Reading & Note-Taking

Higher Education Language & Presentation Support

David Sotir – Advisor Contact us

HELPS (Higher Education Language & Presentation Support) •Location: CB01.05.25 •Telephone: 9514 9733 •Email: helps@uts.edu.au •Website: www.helps.uts.edu.au

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Learning Objectives

• To become familiar with the criteria and process for researching & evaluating information resources in an academic context, before, during and after reading

• To raise consciousness of the importance of reading skills

and review reading strategies/techniques

• To develop note-taking/note-making skills to enhance reading and research skills

Discussion Questions

• How do you read? • What problems do you encounter? • If you recognise where your problems are, you can self

assess & understand the areas you need to improve. • How can you improve? • You adopt strategies to alleviate the strains & stresses of

understanding & using academic texts.

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Ask yourself

• What types of texts do I normally read? • How do I approach a text? • Do I ask myself questions as I read? • What difficulties do I face when I read texts? • How do I overcome these difficulties? • What strategies can I use to help me read & take notes. • How much do I read in a given time?

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Academic Reading Skills

• The 4S reading strategies (Boddington & Calchy 1999; Brick 2009)

• Survey • Skim • Select • Study

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Survey

• This requires you to look at the text & ask questions: • What is the title of the text? What is it about? • Who is the author? Is the author well known in the field?

Reputation? • When was the text written & published? • What organisation published it? • What kind of text is it? (e.g. Authored books; Edited

books; Conference papers; Websites; Academic journals) • Who is the intended audience?

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Skim

• Can you work out the structure of the text? • Can you locate the part of the text that tells the reader

the main ideas & points in the text? • Can you locate the ‘thesis’? • Are there headings in the body of the text? What

information do these headings give? • Are there diagrams, graphs, tables, charts or any other

visuals? What do these tell you?

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Select

• Successful student readers read with a purpose & change the way they read according to the purpose.

• Examples: • Reading to form background understanding (relatively easy) • Reading to prepare for an exam (scanning to find

information directly related to the content of the exam) • Reading to locate information to use in an assignment – the

assignment task will guide to find relevant texts. • When we select, we choose texts that help us achieve

our purpose.

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Study

• In the study phase, we read the text – or part of the text – we have selected very carefully: This is also known as ‘intensive reading’.

• Our objective is to understand what we are reading very well.

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Focused Reading

• Never read without specific questions you want to answer.

• Keep asking yourself: • ‘How will I use this information?’ • What arguments or evidence have I discovered? • What do I need to support my arguments?

• Remove all distractions. 30 mins of quiet reading is better than 5 hours interrupted.

• Try to teach someone else. It sharpens your focus. Explain or summarise an article to a colleague.

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Reflect on your Research

Once you have the relevant information: • What have you discovered and learnt? • How does your new knowledge help your

understanding? • What arguments or evidence have you discovered? • How have your ideas/opinions been influenced? • Do you now have a clearer understanding of the task

ahead?

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Critical Reading

From Collins Cobuild Advanced Learner’s Dictionary: English Dictionary, 4th edn.,2003, Harper Collins, Glasgow.

Be critical ! A critical approach to something involves examining and

judging it carefully.

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Save Time

• Identify the thesis statement. What is it?

• The thesis statement puts forward the writer’s main

argument.

• The thesis can often be found towards the end of the introduction and is usually reiterated in the conclusion as well.

• Read both the introduction and the conclusion first.

• This will give you a framework for reading the rest of the content .

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Why make notes?

•A fundamental reason for taking notes is to enhance your comprehension and retention of the content of a text.

•The ability to put another’s ideas and explanations into your own words as a summary and/or paraphrase demonstrates that you have understood the material you have been reading.

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Other reasons for note-making

• to note down a statement that you wish to quote in an essay, a report or another text

• to summarise an argument in a text for future use in an essay, exam or tutorial

• to register questions and comments that you have while reading, which may be forgotten or overlooked later (these could show your critical thinking skills).

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Effective Notes

Good notes can help you to: •organise your ideas •keep focused while reading and engage with a text •keep a record of what you have read so you can locate it again •think critically and analytically about what you are reading •enable you to draw links to, and conclusions from, other research •highlight areas that you need to develop further

(Adapted from: The University of New South Wales 2012. Note-making from Written Text, UNSW Learning Centre, Sydney)

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Note making strategies

• What is the correct way to take notes when reading?

• There is no one ‘correct’ way to take notes.

• It is worth trying a few of the following approaches & determining which works best for you.

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Marking up (annotating) a text

• One approach to note-making is to underline or keywords or sections of a text,

• to use post-it notes or page stickers to distinguish ideas, • to make brief notes in the margins or between the lines

of the text. • Done with care, this can help you to concentrate and

focus on what you are reading, and it may help you to identify the key points of a text when you are re-reading it later for an exam or an assignment. However, it is not a particularly transformative approach to note-taking.

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Engage with the texts 20

This is useful knowledge for my assignment

However, this information seems to be biased in some way

This section of information disagrees with other authors I have read

These ideas are interesting but not relevant to my discipline

USEFUL QUOTE HERE!

Interesting point raised here – use this!

Theory same as (Smith 2010) and (Allen & Jones 2012), interesting!

Transformative?

• What does transformative mean? • Effective note taking is not simply copying out

information neatly. Rather, it is transforming that information into knowledge according to your needs.

• It involves manipulating the ideas and information, which is likely to improve your understanding of the material.

• What are some transformative note taking strategies?

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Diagrammatic Approaches

• These require you to read actively & recognise the relationship between ideas.

• When you don’t have your own copy of a text, a diagrammatic approach – creating an outline or a map of the contents – can be a useful record of your reading.

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Transformative Approaches

• Transformative approaches involve reproducing the content of a text in different words.

• The two ways we do this are… • A paraphrase involves saying the same thing as the

author, but in your own words. Much of your academic writing will involve paraphrasing ideas from the sources you have read. (Note that a paraphrase can be longer than the original text.)

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Transformative Approaches

• A summary is a restatement of the main points of a text in (much) shorter form. A summary should answer the question, “What is the author basically saying?” It should remain faithful to the author’s emphasis and interpretation, and should not contain your own opinions or comments.

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The Cornell Approach

• A Cornell approach divides your page into two columns and a horizontal space along the bottom.

• The Cornell approach can be used for lectures or reading.

• It involves the 5 Rs. What might these be?

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Cornell 5 R

• First, record ideas while reading in the notes column. • Then reduce these notes to basic concepts and details;

possibly turn answers into questions, in the recall column.

• Next, cover the main notes column and attempt to recite the details from the basic concepts and the questions in the recall column.

• It is important to reflect on ideas or connections that emerge. Take note of such reflections in a separate document.

• Finally, spend 10 minutes or so regularly reviewing these notes while researching an assignment or revising. Further reflections that emerge should be recorded.

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(Source: Ferfolja, T. 2012. Note-making from Written Text, UNSW Learning Centre, Sydney)

Revising

• What can you do to help you prepare to read? • What can you do to help you better understand while you read?

And what can you do when you are really having trouble understanding what you read?

• What can you do if your mind begins to wander and you lose focus while you

read? • What can you do to help you better understand what you’ve read and

remember it after you are finished? • What two strategies listed have you not used before that might help you?

Why do you think so?

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