Learning at Lincoln

• Be prepared! Make sure that you have a pen and plenty of paper or a device that you can quickly take notes with.
• Before the lecture, look at your lecture schedule to find out the subject that is to be covered and do some background reading.
• Print out or take a copy of any PowerPoint slides or lecture notes which have been placed on Blackboard.
• Be punctual so you don’t miss anything at the start of the lecture and have time to settle down and get organised.
• At the start of the lecture note down the lecturer, topic and date.
• Be pro-active in your note making – ask yourself questions to follow up later.
• To help follow a lecture (remember a lecturer may go at a faster pace to that which you are used to), look for verbal signposts, for example, Let’s start by looking at…, Now we’ll move on to …, To sum up…
• Try to be accurate, particularly when noting down calculations.
• Use abbreviations where possible.

During the lecture, use bullet points to note down the key points. Then, after the lecture, watch it back on Panopto and make more notes, using each bullet point as a heading for a new paragraph.

This process ensures you don’t miss any content during the lecture, and you get comprehensive notes that can be used to look back at and revise from.

Making a list of anything you don’t understand within the lecture allows you to look over these at a later date and you can then approach your mentor, lecturer or tutor if you feel you need to.

Doing this stops you from ignoring the content you don’t completely understand and instead encourages you to proactively work towards learning and engaging with it.

At the end of a topic, write up a summary of the key information. This means that, when you come to revise, you can easily find the information that you are looking for, and it also helps to drill the basic understanding into your brain.

Notes don’t have to be boring! They could include a mind-map, colour coding, symbols or diagrams. Get colourful and bright to make the most important parts standout, or even condense your notes further with flashcards.

Not only does doing this make note-taking more fun, but it makes the information you need more memorable too and easier to find when you come to revise.

Doing this ensures that when you revisit your notes you will understand what you have drawn.

There is nothing worse than looking back at your notes to see a beautiful, time-consuming diagram that you can no longer remember the meaning of.

If you are listening to a long lecture, don’t be tempted to take lots of notes at the start and nothing for the rest of the session. Use the method in tip 1 to ensure you don’t lose concentration, or miss any important content.

When you are taking notes from textbooks or other written materials do not copy the material word for word unless you clearly use quotation marks and clearly reference where you got the quote from.

If you do not do this and you go on to use “your” notes in a report or essay and do not adequately reference, you will be committing plagiarism.

An easy way of avoiding this is to write your own interpretation of what the text is saying. This not only means you won’t accidentally plagiarise, but it also helps you retain the information and makes your notes easier to revise from.

Keep separate notebooks or folders for each module that you study, so that you can easily find your work.

Students who study science may find that having a separate notebook for practice problems and calculations is really useful as it avoids getting these muddled up with other notes.

If you are studying a new topic that includes lots of vocabulary you have not encountered before, make a list of new words and their definition.

This will not only help you retain the definitions, but it also gives you a resource to refer to if you forget their meaning.

As notes are normally only for personal use, it is important to remember that you don’t need to worry about spelling, handwriting, punctuation, or using complete sentences.

All that matters is that you get the information written down in a way that YOU can understand when you revisit your notes.