Using our Study Skills Effectively

In the previous chapter we examined the assumptions we need to adopt about the purpose of learning tasks like essay writing. In the light of these, it should be obvious that we now need a new pattern of study – we need to use our study skills differently, in a more effective way for the tasks we’re set. If we don’t, if we retain the assumption that education is exclusively about ‘knowing things’, then certain things will follow. When we start to research an essay, we will be cursed with the sort of problems of which most of us are all too aware. In our note-taking we will continue to argue, quite reasonably on these misplaced assumptions, that when we take notes in tutorials, seminars and lectures, or from the source material we use for research, we cannot leave anything out, because these are the facts, the right answers, and if we omit them we will not have all the facts we need to pass the examination. As a result we take vast quantities of verbatim notes. Even worse, they’re unstructured, because all we’re doing is recording them accurately – we’re not processing them in any way for fear of getting them wrong. Consequently, we’re left with masses of unusable notes, most of them irrelevant to the essays we are set and the questions we’re going to have to answer in the examination.