Reading and Making Notes 3e

1 PART HEAD

NOW YOU ARE AT UNIVERSITY …

Chapter head

Active reading and note-making

At university, you need to ‘move up a level’ in terms of how you approach your reading, how you think about what you read, and how you make and use notes that reflect and enhance these deeper thinking processes.

At school/college At university

Your reading material* is usually set and managed by the teacher.

Apart from a few key texts*, you are expected to decide what to read and what not to read.

All the students on a course read the same texts. You choose what to read, so some of your sources* will be different from those of the other students, even if you are all doing the same assignment.

At school/college At university

Students learn mainly by absorbing the information in the texts and repeating it in different forms.

Although there are different reasons for making notes, the main purpose is to record information and ideas.

You are expected to make up your own mind about whether, why and how the ideas in the literature* are important. Therefore, what you write about in relation to your reading texts will be unique to you.

At university, there is a much wider range of reasons for making notes. One of the key purposes is to help you develop and record a clear picture of your individual understanding, analysis and evaluation of a text.

* Throughout this book I use the terms material, sources and texts interchangeably to refer to any type of written, visual or spoken document. The term literature refers to all the material within an academic discipline or subject.

AND MAKING NOTES

Having an active approach

We can summarise the points above by saying that at university you are expected to be an active scholar and take responsibility for your own learning. Rather than just learn and then reproduce an idea or piece of information, you are expected to understand and then analyse, question and evaluate it. Importantly, you can’t do these things in a vacuum; they can only be done in relation to your own context – your current knowledge, ideas and worldview.

So, the main point of university study is to examine and apply your own thinking to current knowledge and, in doing so, produce new data, insights, ideas, theories or solutions that constitute new knowledge.

Below are strategies to help you engage your brain by thinking about the information before, during and after you read and/or make notes.

Active reading and note-making