How to study - Bonus episode

Descriptive transcript

[Intro music plays]

Rachel: Hi and welcome to this bonus episode of the UTS Student Hacks podcast. In this episode, David Taplin shares more of his advice on note-taking and time management. Enjoy the episode!

David: Hi there, I'm David Taplin. I'm one of the counsellors in the Counselling Service, which is part of the Student Services Unit. My specific role is Learning Skills Counsellor, and I meet with students in conversations about how to learn effectively and how to be efficient and organised with study.

Kelly: So our first question would be, what is good time management?

David: Good time management is making sure you have time to get the things done that are important to you within the time frame that is appropriate for getting those things done.

Kelly: In order to get those things done, what would be your key tips in managing time efficiently and effectively?

David: When we say time management, we really mean self-management, which is about prioritisation and organisational strategies.

Rachel: Why do you think it’s a good practice to start managing your time, even though it's still pretty early in the semester?

David: The reason I think you would start thinking about time and self-management right from probably week minus one is because what you do at university is really hard work for your brain. Thinking takes brain energy, and what is referred to in the literature as cognitive load. If you are managing yourself and your time well, some aspects of your organisational and planning tasks become automatised, become automatic, and therefore they're not requiring intense thinking effort. Therefore, there's more thinking power available for the key thinking tasks of university, which is learning the content of the subjects.

Kelly: So getting into a habit so you don’t need to think about, “Oh, I need to do this today,” but more like, “There’s something I should be doing to make sure I’m on track with things?”

David: Exactly. We often associate habits with bad habits, but actually good habits are really good. If you’ve got a plan and structure to your week and your semester that reflects doing things in an organised, regular, routine way, there’s a lot less effort involved in that process of initiating a task, which is often where many students become derailed. Once they finally get started with a task, they can do the task, but there is often a lot of avoidance, procrastination and delay with actually getting started. That’s where some of the time and self-management strategies are really helpful, because it allows you to push into that getting started earlier, so that last part of the semester is significantly less stressful.

Kelly: I know one key task I would assume all students go through is note-taking, especially during class or just making notes for finals. When do you think is the most effective time for note-taking?

David: Yes, to all those times. I would think of effective note-taking as a process rather than an event in time. Particularly if you’re doing subjects with flipped tasks, your note-taking process would start prior to class in relation to some of the preparation work that academics would be expecting students to do. Then there would be note-taking activities during the learning event, whether that’s a lab, a studio, a lecture-style class or whatever. And then as soon as possible afterwards—which practically isn’t always immediately afterwards, but ideally the same day—there’s an additional process of note-taking or note elaboration, which is about consolidating your learning and activity around those notes.

So, for example, one of the things I always encourage students to do when they're taking notes in a lecture or tutorial-style class is to leave large gaps in their notes to represent things like: this was a really important issue we were covering at this point in the class and I want to come back and elaborate some detail to this important issue; or, I found this really hard to follow or confusing or challenging, so I left a gap to signal that I need to do more work on this particular part of the class material; or, I got distracted or I fell behind and I’m not quite clear about what should have been there. By leaving some spaces, you signal to yourself that there’s more that should be here than is currently there, and that means when you do that review process of your notes, you have some target and focus to what you’re adding to that.

And then the final step of note-taking—which is no longer the note-taking part, it’s the note-using part—is each week I would be aiming to set aside a small amount of time to review the previous week’s topic. Go back over the notes you’ve taken from the previous week in that subject, do some elaboration, checking and re-engaging with the material before it fades too strongly in your memory.

Rachel: We know that note-taking is important during classes, but will it actually help students retain information, or is it just to summarise what the lecturer has been saying? What would you say is the importance of note-taking?

David: The importance of note-taking relates to why you’re taking notes. Some people would be taking notes primarily as an aid to try and direct their focus in the learning event, and other people are taking notes almost as a record of the learning event. What you see some students do is take notes as a record of the learning event and then they never look at them again, or they look at them the night before the exam. That’s not very effective utilisation of the notes. If you’re thinking of note-taking as part of a learning process, you would be taking notes as a focus aid while you’re actually in the learning event, and then they become a partial record of that learning event which you can then subsequently elaborate in detail to be a structure to assist you with the review and revision processes, particularly when you have exam-based assessments at the end of the semester.

Rachel: It’s really great that you mentioned the why. Some students just want to write everything that the lecturer has been saying, and there’s research that shows the average lecturer speaks 120 to 180 words per minute, but the typing speed just reaches 33 words. So what would be your advice for new students that don’t really know what’s important to write and what to leave out?

David: If they have done the pre-work in preparation for that learning event, they should have some sense of what would be significant or important. If I was meeting with a student and they were saying something along the lines of, “I don’t know how to recognise what’s important,” then I would suggest that they need to do more preparation for that class activity so they’ve got a stronger sense of what’s important, because the answer to the question of what’s important becomes what’s important to you. It’s identifying things that are either new learning, things that you want to carry forward, or identifying elements of the learning that you’re finding confusing or hard to access, that you need to signal to yourself that you need to do more work on. That kind of style of note-taking, which is “I’m trying to take some semi-verbatim record of the event that I’m going to come back and re-read the notes as if I’m reiterating the lecture”—as you observe, Rachel, you can’t keep up with that pace, and if you think of it in terms of cognitive thinking processes, if you are to engage with trying to keep a record, you’re not actually engaging with thinking about the content that you are supposed to be learning.

Kelly: Any final remarks?

David: The final remark I would make would be in relation to UTS in your bedroom, which is a common experience of many students last semester and possibly this semester as well. To think of the reality that we’re in the same physical space, but we have to be in two headspaces. So really thinking about some ways that you can signal to your brain that even though you’re in the same physical space, you’re now in the headspace to do your university work. That’s things like trying to avoid being in bed when you’re trying to study, because beds aren’t for study, they’re for other things. If you are recreating with a screen in the same space that you are studying with a screen, try at least to make some ways that that feels different, to help your brain develop the habit of “Oh, now it’s UTS at home study time,” rather than having a sense that there’s no differentiation between the moments when you’re at home at home and the moments you’re at home at university.

Kelly: You have reached the end of this episode. Now, to recap on how to manage your time effectively.

Rachel: Step one: plan.

Kelly: Step two: understand why you are writing notes.

Rachel: Step three: take care of yourself.

Kelly: We hope you find these tips helpful.

Rachel: See you in our next podcast episode. Until then—

Rachel and Kelly: Stay organised.

[Concluding music plays]