Research Based Strategies: Summarizing and Note Taking

          I feel that summarizing and note taking are truly essential to the success of students. I take notes meticulously. I find it extremely helpful when I can look at my notes and find the essential information needed to either prepare for a test or just familiarize myself with the concepts discussed.  

          I do not think that these are skills that come automatically for most students. Summarizing and note taking, for the most part, requires the student to be able to discern and pull out the most important bits of information from a text or a lecture. Then they must learn how to make these notes meaningful to them in a personal way.

          The article states that summarizing and notes taking “includes analyzing information, identifying key concepts, and defining extraneous information”. (“Summarizing and Note Taking”, 2005) What does a student do, however, if he/she is not an effective note taker? What if he/she was never instructed on how to take notes? The student, unfortunately, would most likely get lost in the quagmire of information and just give up. This article asserts that teachers should be instilling these valuable skills in their students. Sadly, however, most teachers just assume that students can do this on their own and these skills are never addressed.

          The PowerPoint activity did not really support the strategy of summarizing and note taking. If we are assuming that this is a new activity for the students, then the students should have received some instruction ahead of time on how to use PowerPoint and should have been allowed to take notes throughout the whole process to which they could refer (or even study and practice with). Yes, the students were presented with notes (instructions really) that the teacher had developed; but if the students had been allowed to use their own notes on how to navigate and use PowerPoint, perhaps they would not have felt so lost and confused.

          How could this activity have been modified to reflect the research based strategy of summarizing and note taking? The teacher could have given one or more very similar activities to the students and walked them through each step, allowing the students to take notes as needed. The students could have used their notes and modify them each time they went through the process. As stated in the article, the teacher should be encouraging the students to review and refine their notes and even encourage the students to use pictures, symbols, and diagrams when taking notes. These techniques would have been particularly effective for this assignment.

Summarizing and note taking. (2005). Retrieved Feb. 19, 2012, from

   http://www.netc.org/focus/strategies/summ.php