Five Reasons Prepping for Class Saves Time
by Crystal Jonas
See Reprint Permissions below

A little investment of time goes a long way.

SHAVE HOURS OFF FUTURE STUDY TIME

Prime your mind to store and retain information.   Here are five reasons prepping for class makes learning a whole lot easier.

1.     Big Picture Overview primes memory

Our memory works by associating new ideas with old ones.  When you read the assignment, and review the notes from last class, you pave the way for new information to be connected with this big picture concept that you’ve just studied.

It gives our mind an overall picture of what the main themes of the class will be.  Our brains naturally store and recall information more effectively when we start with a big picture concept of the key ideas, and then fill in with specific examples and applications.

2.   You’ll recognize and understand key terms more readily.  Remember, understanding key terms, and their interconnection with key concepts is the basis for taking brief, memorable notes. For example, say your Psychology class is studying Freud.  You need to know about the ego, superego, and the id, and when Freud says the develop.  Reviewing ahead of time, you’ve primed you mind to pick up on your teacher’s mentioning any of these key terms.  You will be able to listen more carefully, and to take more meaningful notes on how these three concepts influence each other and psychological development.

3.   It allows note taking shorthand.

Read ahead allows to check off directly in your book when the teacher covers something that is in there.  Those unprepared will be writing like mad; you’ll simply be putting a symbol beside anything the teacher mentions that’s in the book.  I recommend the letter “c” with a circle around it, so you can quickly notice that this is information covered in class.  Anything mentioned both in the book and in the classroom is worth making a special note of.

4.  It primes active listening

Finally, coming prepared sets you up for active listening.  The golden nuggets that you want in your notes are contained within the key words and key concepts in 10% of the lecture.

Let me cover the idea of key words and concepts in more depth here.

Say you just saw a great movie and you want to tell some friends about it.  How much do you tell them?  Certainly, not all the dialogue, in fact, you probably wouldn’t mention the dialogue at all unless it contained a funny joke.

Nope, you’d stick with the synopsis, just the highlights.  You would condense a two-hour show into a five-minute description.

The review you would give the movie contains the essence of the key words.  That’s exactly what you’ll want to write down when you’re taking notes on a lecture, the main ideas, not every word.  Imagine that you’re going to tell a fellow classmate who had to miss class what the lecture was about.  Those ideas you’d tell her are what you want in your notes.

5.  Prep makes taking notes a lot easier.

Perhaps the best way to take notes is a process of three-dimensional, one-page note taking, sometimes called brain webs or mind maps®.  In this process, the central idea is placed in the middle, and the main themes radiate outward with subcategories attached to their respective themes.

When you’ve looked at the material before class, you have a much better idea of how the key points interconnect.  This helps you to write your notes in a way that shows you how the concepts relate to each other.

©2006 Crystal Jonas