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Note-taking: purpose, problems and proposals: drawing on classroom experience, Viv Sanders offers advice and seeks answers.

Article Excerpt
As talking about note-taking in a vacuum can be difficult, I refer here to an exercise I set my Year 12 students every June: taking notes upon Martin McCauley's 148-page The Origins of the Cold War, 1941-49 (Longman Pearson, 2003). They are given several weeks to do it, with the option of doing some work in the summer vacation. In the first week of the autumn term, I read and try to make helpful comments on their notes. This note-taking exercise causes some students great problems, despite my efforts to explain and justify the task as fully as possible, both orally and in a written booklet. I would like to be able to make this note-taking exercise go more smoothly.

Purpose of Note-Taking

I always hope that explaining to students why I am asking them to do a particular task makes the task more acceptable. I explain why I am setting them the note-taking task on McCauley.

(a) General purpose of note-taking

* Making notes on a book helps us to focus on the content and to remember it. The more we make notes, the easier it becomes.

* Notes should be easier for us to re-read than the book itself, as they will be shorter and in our own familiar style.

* Once formal education is finished, we often have to use documents or other books, so note-taking is a useful transferable skill.

* We usually need to acquire specific information from a book, and our notes will select and summarise what is important to us.

(b) Specific...

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