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Next: Conclusion Up: COLLEGE LEARNING WAYS & Previous: On Imitation

Learning from Lectures

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss ways to maximize learning in the CLASSROOM.

You should learn:

1.
That listening is an effortful response.
2.
The importance of being prepared.
3.
How to be mentally active in class.
4.
Why you should rewrite and reduce your lecture notes.
5.
The importance of review and recitation.
6.
When learning may be consolidated.
There are very good reasons to learn how to learn from lectures. Most professors are, at least to some extent, egocentric. What this implies is that they tend to consider the information given during class to be more important than that in the text or other sources. Furthermore, most professors want to reward the students who attend class regularly by asking questions that can only be answered from information given in lecture. For both of these reasons, exams usually lean heavily toward lecture material.

Many educational theorists are critical of the lecture method of teaching. They generally consider a one-on-one tutorial arrangement ideal, and a large lecture class is diametrically opposite. The critic's image of a lecture was captured in a cartoon showing, on one side, the podium with the lecture being given by a tape recorder rather than by the professor in person, and on the other side, the lecture being recorded on tape instead of by the students in person. Insofar as that is an accurate image of a real lecture class, it would indeed be an inferior method.

However, a good lecturer does not rigidly follow a script but instead continually reacts to feedback from the class, sometimes slowing down to repeat a point, sometimes digressing from the main theme to give the class a mental rest, and frequently referring to current events of interest to the class. For their part, good students do not attempt to record everything the lecturer says but instead engage in what we called divided selective attention. A lecture should require hard mental effort from everyone. Just like your body, your mind gets tired from doing hard work. Hence, one of the ways you can know whether you have been doing your job is to ask whether you feel mentally exhausted after listening to a lecture. If so, you have earned a break.

How does one improve his or her skills at learning from lectures? It is tempting to say that all one needs is practice, that proficiency will come naturally with experience. However, the Principle of Contiguity implies that practice only perpetuates whatever behavior is practiced, which means that one can only learn better skills by trying them out. The purpose of this chapter is to describe some steps in learning from lectures that I can recommend.

In doing so, however, I would emphasize again that the optimal learning strategy is to some extent idiosyncratic. We each have our personal style based on our unique composite of learning experiences. Hence, my real purpose is to encourage you to try out various alternative learning strategies in order to discover the one that is best for you. It may turn out that your current method is best, but even so, you will have benefited from trying out different techniques.

My recommended learning strategy requires ten steps. As usual, I will tell you why I think each step is important. You probably already know many of these ideas, but it is better to repeat them than to leave the picture incomplete.

Learning from Lectures Step 1: READ. The Scout motto, "Be Prepared," applies to students attending a lecture. Professors vary a great deal in how closely their lectures follow the text readings, but most professors presume that the students have at least read the assignment before class. Hence, the steps in getting the most out of lectures begin well before the lecture itself: Read the Text.

One reason that preparation is important in learning from lectures is to get past the awkward phase of being introduced to new ideas and concepts. Meeting a concept is something like meeting a blind date in that there are a number of superficial things to learn before you begin to find out what it really means. How a word is spelled, how it is pronounced, and how it is used in sentences are all tangential to understanding its meaning. A lecture is very much easier to follow if you are already acquainted with the terminology. There are other reasons to prepare for a lecture by reading the assignment in advance. It may lead you to ask helpful questions in class, especially if the professor appears to say something that differs from the text. It may give you a general framework with which to organize the lecture, especially if the professor tends to ramble. It may also reduce your note-taking activity because you do not need to copy definitions and graphs that you know are in the text. The point is that lectures and texts are reciprocal learning aids. First, read the text to prepare yourself for the lecture, and then attend the lecture to prepare yourself for studying the text. Learning from Lectures Step 2: READY. One way in which your mind is like a muscle is that your mind needs to "warm-up" before engaging in hard work. But warming up your mind is not quite the same as warming up your body because you need to set your mind for a particular subject. Engaging in a discussion on financial affairs does not prepare your mind for a lecture in Chemistry. Warming up your mind is called "priming," and involves recalling old knowledge about a subject in preparation for adding new knowledge.

You can think of knowledge that is stored in your memory as being in a dormant state, available but inactive. Whenever you think about something, you activate those ideas into consciousness and also activate associated ideas into a near-conscious state. They do not revert directly to the dormant state but instead they gradually fade. Ideas that have recently been activated are easier to recall than ones that have been idle for a long time. It is less work to process a lecture if you have primed your mind by reviewing related ideas.

It is easy to get the basic idea of priming. Read each of the following words slowly, thinking briefly about their meaning to you: dollar...loan ...money...wallet...gold...bank. Now I would be very surprised if the word "bank" in the preceding list led you to think of the bank of a river. Having primed your mind with ideas related to fiscal matters, you are most likely to think along the same lines when new ideas are introduced. It is for this reason, by the way, that many people are concerned about violence on T.V., ads for alcohol, pornography, etc. If you prime your mind with sexy thoughts you will likely think of sexual interpretations of neutral stimuli.

My strong recommendation is that you arrange your schedule so that you can arrive at class a few minutes before the scheduled start of a lecture and prime your mind by reviewing your lecture notes from the last class. There may not be close continuity from one lecture to the next, but the important thing is to get your thoughts directed toward the relevant subject matter. Your mind will then be ready to start processing the new ideas you hear during the lecture. Learning from Lectures Step 3: REACT. It is easy to listen passively to a lecture, and it is hard work to listen actively, with your attention divided between receiving information and processing it. îThe time to learn the ideas presented during a lecture is during the lecture itself.ï Many students think that their goal is to record as much of the information as possible so that they can study and learn later. There are two things wrong with this approach. In the first place, if you don't understand the ideas when they are presented in the lecture, it is very unlikely that you can figure them out later from your notes. In the second place, it is a waste of time.

In most lecture situations, active participation means only covert listening and thinking. But if the lecturer says something that you do not understand, then it is your job to ask for clarification. Recall that the lecturer is using words to try to explain a non-verbal idea. If you were paying attention and didn't understand what was said, it is the lecturer's fault, not yours. It is her or his job to put the idea into meaningful-to-you terms. . .assuming, of course, that you have a college-level vocabulary. You can't expect a professor to "dumb-down" an idea to words at a childish level, but you can expect different words and different examples aimed at clarifying the idea. Never leave a lecture confused. When active listening-thinking isn't enough, ask questions during or after class.

Learning from Lectures Step 4: RECORD. Almost every other book on college learning advises students to take lots of notes during a lecture, as many as three or four pages an hour. My advice is just the opposite: Take few written notes. I hasten to remind you that the best learning tactics are idiosyncratic, and you must determine for yourself how many notes you take. The answer will probably not be the same for every course. But I recommend that you don't try to be neat, and take only as many written notes as you think you will need to remind you of what was said.

Why do I advise against taking lots of written notes? Because your mind can only think of one thing at a time; you have a limited capacity for time- sharing among different activities. Writing requires a lot of sustained attention. Take a moment to try this little exercise: Start tapping your non- preferred hand regularly on the desk at a rate of about two taps per second. Now try to keep tapping while you write anything that comes to mind. You will find that writing requires so much attention that even tapping becomes irregular. Similarly, unless the lecture is very slow and redundant, writing is incompatible with listening-thinking.

Taking notes IS NOT active participation. It takes much less mental effort to copy what the lecturer is saying than to process it. Many students don't understand a drawing that I put on the chalkboard because they are very busy neatly copying the drawing instead of listening to what I am saying about it. Learn first, then write notes. You may have noticed that I referred to "written" notes in the preceding paragraphs. Writing is the slowest of the verbal skills. If you write neatly for an hour, you can read what you wrote in five minutes or less...and you can think it in two minutes or less. Hence, my advice is to take lots of îmental notesï during the lecture, and only jot down enough written notes to remind you of what was said. In this context, don't worry about neatness, spelling, or grammar, and use any shorthand symbols you know or improvise. The lecturer may deliberately pause to give you time to write, but more generally, you need to keep your limited attentional capacity focused on the lecture and not diverted by the mechanical act of writing.

Learning from Lectures Step 5: Re_WRITE. If you do as I have advocated, you will probably find that your scribbled notes would not be very meaningful several days or weeks later. The ideas you learned in lecture immediately begin to fade from memory, and you will need more complete written notes in the future. Accordingly, sometime shortly after a lecture, and certainly that day or evening, you need to re-write your notes. I don't mean just copying them over neatly. I mean using your written notes to remind you of your mental notes, reconstructing the lecture in your mind, and then writing down in your own words as much as you think you will need when it comes time to prepare for the exam. You are not graded on your notes. Just be sure that you will be able to read and understand them later.

This re-write step pertains even if you decide to take a lot of written notes in class. A half-hour to refresh your memory now can be worth several hours of study later. This is because you not only have to get knowledge into your memory, you also have to be able to get it out, to remember it later. If you re-write your lecture notes in the way I have elucidated, recalling what the lecturer said and summarizing the ideas in your own words, you are completing the input(tm)output cycle. In the process, you may find out that you really didn't understand something very well and you should ask the professor about that before the next class. But the main advantage is that you will have begun to practice remembering the information while it is still fresh in your mind and hence it is relatively easy to recall.

Learning from Lectures Step 6: REVIEW. You may sometimes combine this step with the preceding one, but the ideal procedure is to re-write your lectures notes soon after the lecture and then review them again shortly before going to bed that night. The reason for this is given in the note at the end of this chapter on consolidation of learning. Of all the suggestions I have about learning, the cheapest in the sense of pay-off per minute, is to review your notes before sleeping. Just five minutes spent with your notes before bed-time can greatly enhance your memory of the material.

Learning from Lectures Step 7: REDUCE. Your notebook should become a second text for the course material. For it to serve that purpose, you need to have written your notes in such a way that you can mark up your notebook much as you do a textbook. As you can probably anticipate by now, I do not believe that there is any one best way to transcribe your notes. The most common method is to write in longhand in a spiral notebook. Because I had learned to type much faster than I could write legibly, I preferred to re-write on the typewriter. If you have a word(tm)processor and a printer, using a personal computer could be an ideal technique. Any method with which you feel comfortable is as good as any other for you.

There is one important guideline in re-writing your notes: Be sure to leave plenty of blank space to write îshort summariesï of the main ideas. The reduction step, condensing ideas into fewer words, is the real essence of mastering a subject. This is because we think in units called "chunks" of information. There is no fixed size of a chunk of information; the size depends on learning. But you can only hold in mind about seven chunks at a time, and so the larger the chunks, the more information you can process.

For example, if you are a baseball fan, the term "triple-play" is a large chunk of information. You not only know that it means to get three outs in a single play, but you have clear ideas of the most likely ways that this can happen. It may also mean a few unusual or very critical triple-plays in your experience. All of this is wrapped up in the single concept (chunk), but only if you have learned that much. The process of chunking happens automatically as you keep going over your notes, but you can facilitate the process by reducing your notes to concise summaries of the ideas.

Learning from Lectures Step 8: RECITE. There is one aspect of learning that all experts agree is very important but that only a few students practice: Recitation. In common usage, "to recite" means to repeat the material word for word, and that is appropriate if you are required to memorize something so that you can give the answer verbatim. As we use the term, "to recite" means to recall the material from memory, not necessarily verbatim.

Indeed, in most cases, word for word recitation is ineffectual. This form of recitation is called "maintenance rehearsal" because it holds the information briefly in your mind. This is what you do when you keep repeating a telephone number while waiting to dial it. If you repeat it enough times, you memorize

the number. However, for most college learning, the best form of recitation is to put the material into your own words. This is called "elaborative rehearsal" because it requires you to recapitulate/describe/ explain the idea. Indeed, you should try to say it in a number of different ways, and where appropriate, you should try to give original examples of the idea. Furthermore, you should spend at least half of your total study time rehearsing the material. "Going over your notes" should not mean simply re-reading them. You need to close your eyes or look away from your notebook and rehearse the ideas elaboratively.

This is the one stage in learning where studying with someone can be conducive to better understanding of the material. After you both have completed the preceding steps and are ready to practice recalling your knowledge from memory, you may find that having another student criticize your summary, and you, in turn, criticizing her or his summary, will sharpen your understanding of the subject. Because you bring different backgrounds to the subject, your thoughts may be somewhat different. Collaboration works best when you are approximately equally good students. You not only practice recalling ideas from memory, but you both gain new ideas.

However, recitation does not require another real person. . .an imaginary person will do very well. Those of us in the business all attest to the fact that the very best way to learn a topic is to try to teach it. Hence, one of the most beneficial ways to rehearse what you have learned is to imagine yourself teaching it to someone else. Which is more, you can conjure up different types of students: first a child to whom you must explain the idea in simple terms; next an educated lay person with a good vocabulary but little knowledge of the subject; then a fellow student who, for legitimate reasons, did not attend the class; finally, your professor who already understands the idea and wants to know that you also understand it. In this last case, your very brief summary will probably suffice. In my experience, reciting material in these various ways is an excellent context to learn to become your own worst critic. If you listen to yourself while you are reciting (or better yet, record your recitation so you can listen later), you can learn to grade your own performance. No one knows better than you whether you were trying to fake it or whether you really understand it but are having difficulty remembering it or finding words to express it. In the former case, you need to return to the review/reduce steps to learn it better. In the latter case, you need additional practice at recitation.

Learning from Lectures Step 9: Re_REVIEW. The basic principles of learning apply regardless of the source of the information. Thus, the arguments given in the last chapter about the need for frequent review apply to lecture notes as well as to the textbook. One of the most common tactical errors is to wait until an exam is scheduled before reviewing lecture notes. Even the best notes will have lost some of their meaning if you have not refreshed your memory of the ideas from time to time between the lecture and the exam.

One excellent time to review lecture notes is just before the next class, and one of the best places to review is in the classroom. Reviewing before class primes your mind for the next lecture, and doing it in the classroom where the exam will be given associates the recall of knowledge with that context. You get double benefit from getting to class a few minutes ahead of schedule and reviewing notes. When there is time to do so, my advice is to review all of your notes from the beginning of the term. As with the text, doing so will help you synthesize ideas from past lectures with the current one.

Learning from Lectures Step 10: RETRIEVAL. To a large extent, the antecedent steps have gone a long way toward preparing you for an exam. However, there are a few additional tactics to consider. These are described in the succeeding chapter.


 
next up previous contents
Next: Conclusion Up: COLLEGE LEARNING WAYS & Previous: On Imitation
Derek Hamilton
2000-09-05