Note Taking vs Active Recall

Yes, I am attempting to take the most mainstream study tactic down and explain why you should be using this new thing you've never heard of. Bear with me on this, I'm going to put a 90% on your next test paper. Why am I being so confident? Not because of my inflated ego, but because I genuinely believe this.

Firstly, here are my main two problems with taking notes outside of class:

1. Taking notes outside of class is slow

While your hand feels like someone dropped a fridge on it, there is someone else touch typing away on Notion and making a practical quick set of notes that they can revise on their phone. And guess what. Their capital Q looks a lot better than the one you have rewritten four times.

2. You are given the impression that you know your work

While you are writing notes you are given a false impression that you are learning and understanding the work. If you think you are multitasking by trying to type/write and learn at the same time then I must inform you that you are decreasing your productivity by 60% and lowering your IQ (at that moment) by over 10 percent! (Taken from Ikigai by Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles).

Active recall

Firstly active recall is the single best study technique ever discovered and there is heaps of research to back it up. Try it and you will NEVER go back.

Preparation

(this helps to keep the flow and eliminate distractions.)

Grab a coffee or tea, get comfy, and put on some music with no lyrics.

Then grab a highlighter and highlight the important information. Teachers should make the notes, highlight them and only give us the bare essentials. Unfortunately, we have to do that ourselves. Once you have highlighted the nice parts, go onto your phone, watch a YouTube video on the topic you want to study and use the toggle list option in Notion and write questions based on the information in the highlighted parts of your notes.

Eg.

Have a look at the example above. The arrows represent the toggle questions and the “Velocity of a wave” one shows the answer. After your note is converted into question form, revise that about 3-4 times (maybe more) and you are golden baby!

Studying is developing the ability to retrieve information from your brain, not stuff information in.