professor has included to clarify the
main points for you. He hopes the
extra information will tease you into
greater awareness of those main points.
He would be horrified to realize that
most of his students miss those main
points and remember the details
instead.
You can pick out the main points by
listening for cue phrases. Sometimes
cues are very simple: “Our topic for
today is.. .“the professor will say. But
other times he will bury his cue in
elaborate rhetoric, and you will have
to figure out where the rhetoric ends
and the main point begins: “Picture
the day Lincoln arrived at Gettysburg
in his dark top hat and cape, his
shoulders stooped.” the professor
intones, and you wonder if this lecture
is about Gettysburg, Civil War fash
ion, or curvature of the spine. Keep
listening. He’ll drop a cue eventually.
Cues for related subpoints can be
very brief and are easily missed if
you’re not listening hard. Phrases like
“on the other hand,” “another way of
looking at that,” “next in impor
tance,” “turning now to,” can signal a
new point. Sometimesasingleword—
“however,” “therefore,” “but” may
introduce a point. You have to think
as you listen, learning to differentiate
the trivial from the important.
Encoding Follows Naturally
Once listening is mastered, note
taking becomes absurdly simple. All
you have to do is write down the main
points, adding just as much detail as
you care to for your own entertain
ment or clarification. Studies have
been made of different note-taking
styles, and the studies are, frankly,
inconclusive. One study comparing
four note-taking styles—a formal
outline method, a two-column for
mat, the “Cornell three-column for
mat” and “no special method”—
revealed that none of the methods had
any merit over the others. There were
no differences in student grades at
tributable to note-taking methods.
But a study that compared students
who did not take notes with those who
did, revealed that note-takers always
make better grades. It’s not “how” but
“whether” you take notes that counts.
Why? None of the researchers ven
tured any answers, but it may be that
note-taking is a form of encoding.
Lectures make you select what’s im
portant (because you don’t have time
to get everything down), and they
make you put the information down
in your own words(becauseyoudon’t
have time to put it down in the
professor’s words). In lecture you
become an encoder in spite of your
self. You’re forced to do there what
youshould dofortexts.Nowonderso
many students feel they learn more in
lectures. A text ought to be more
Two Unlikely Learning Techniques
I
Teaching Others
It’s true. Teachers learn more
from a course than the students. If
you try to teach material to someone
else, you are forced to grasp it in new
ways, to express it in terms the other
person can understand. This helps
you remember. Tests at one univer
sity had a group of students study
material using the SQ3R method.
Another group also used the SQ3R
method but was required to teach
the material to other students. The
student teachers did significant
ly better on tests than the control
group. The catch in this technique is
finding a “student” who is willing to
learn biology or psychology or eco
nomics from you. But if you can talk
someone into being your student.
you may learn more than you ever
have before.
Mapping
Some people are just visually
minded, so transforming a text or
lecture into a picture or “map” might
be the best way for these people to
learn. To draw a map, put down the
key idea first. This becomes the
“buried treasure” on your map.
Then draw in secondary or support
ing ideas around the buried treasure.
Lastly, draw in the critical details.
Why this works is that you have to
find the secondary and supporting
ideas before you can draw them. In
doing that you learn them. Map
ping, as its author, M. Buckley
Hanf, says, “is thinking.” And the
best way to learn maping is to do it.
valuable than a lecture because it’s
better organized, more comprehen
sive and less likely to mumble. Yet a
text can’t force you to encode.
Ah, But What of It?
One autumn when students re
turned to campus, a professor named
E. B. Greene gave them the same
exams they had taken the spring
before. Even “A” students had for
gotten 50 percent of all they had
successfully memorized the term be
fore. Another professor, E. T. Lay
ton, found that students lost two
thirds of their algebraic knowledge
after a year.
What’s the use? Even with the best
study habits, you will eventually
forget what you’ve learned. You will
get through tests, but what of it if it’s
all gone by next term? Memorizing,
dictaphone style, seemstoallstudents
a pointless exercise.
In a 1932 book called The Psy
chology of Study, Cecil Mace wrote,
“If the student has any compensating
merit, it lies in being something more
than a mere recording machine.” That
something, he argued, was thinking
ability. You are doomed to forget
most of what you learn; the only merit
in all this is that somehow because of
it, or at worst in spite of it, you learn to
trunk.
But what is thinking? The best
Mace could do in 30-odd pages of
essay was suggest that free association
might be involved. H undreds of other
thinkers have struggled with the ques
tion, and among them the most
honest might be Walter(OK4R) Pauk
who has said that thinking, despite all
the thinking done about it, remains
largely a private matter.
So how is memorization related to
this private skill? For an insight into
that we can go all the way back to a
letter the not-yet Saint Thomas
Aquinas wrote to a Brother John:
“Since you have asked me how one
should set about to acquire the treas
ure of knowledge, this is my advice to
you concerning it: namely, that you
should choose to enter, not straight
way into the ocean, but by way of the
little streams; for difficult things
ought to be reached by way of easy
ones.... Do not heed by whom a thing
is said, but rather what is said you
should commit to your memory...
Victor White, commenting on this
letter, has written: “Note how careful
St. Thomas is. Brother John is to
commit what is said to his memory; he
is not straightway to commit his
intellect to it. He is not at once to
swallow everything that is said; let
him remember it in order to test and
examine it, but not at once to assent to
J