WHAT IS GPA ?

GPA is an acronyms of Grade Point Average. It is average performances point of the student’s earn in their studies of all subjects over a period of time such as one semester.

WHY TAKE LECTURE NOTES?

Other than attending class every day, taking good lecture notes is probably the single
most important activity for college students. Taking notes during college lectures
is a difficult task for most entering college students because little or no real
practice in note taking occurred when they were in high school. There, note taking
involved copying the information off the chalkboard as the teacher talked and
wrote. In college, however, most professors don’t do the job of note taking for you.
Instead, you must listen, select the appropriate information, paraphrase it, condense
it, and then write it down with few (if any) clues from the professor. Developing
good note-taking skills takes both time and practice. Taking lecture notes
promotes active listening, provides an accurate record of information, provides an
opportunity to interpret, condense, and organize the information, and provides an
opportunity for repetition of the material. Learning and practicing effective strategies
for how to take lecture notes will help you become a more successful student.

HOW TO TAKE LECTURE NOTES

1.Evaluate Your Note-Taking Skills

• Consider the Content
• Consider the Organization

2.Prepare Before Taking Notes

3.Become an Active Listener

• Deciding you want to listen
• Paying attention to the lecture
• Selecting relevant information and ignoring the distractions around you
• Interpreting the information to make it meaningful
• Condensing the information before writing it down
• Organizing the information under the appropriate headings or subheadings
• Taking notes

Strategies for Improving Your Listening Skills;

• Read the text assignment before the lecture to build background on the topic.
• Review your last set of notes before the lecture begins.
• Sit in the professor’s line of vision (first row across or middle row from the front
to the back of the room).
• Decide that you want to listen.
• Focus your attention physically by sitting up and making eye contact with the
speaker.
• Focus your attention mentally by eliminating or avoiding distractions.
• Listen with an open mind, setting aside your own biases.
• Control your emotional responses.
• Listen for the main points and related details and take notes.
• Ask and answer questions.
• Monitor your listening. Check with the lecturer or a classmate (at the end of the
lecture) if you’re unsure of some of the information.
• Hold yourself accountable for the material presented.

GENERAL TEST-TAKING STRATEGIES

The first step in taking an essay exam is to read and follow the directions. Some
students have actually failed essay exams, not because they didn’t know the information, but because they didn’t read and follow directions. Unfortunately, they
just plunged into the exam without making sure they knew how to proceed.

MONITOR YOUR CONCENTRATION

Monitoring how often you lose your concentration can be very helpful in learning
how to improve your concentration. Put a check mark or write the time in the
margin of your book or your lecture notes every time you’re distracted. At the end
of your class or study session, count the number of interruptions. Make a commitment to reduce that number the next time you read or go to your lecture. In a few
weeks, you may find that your ability to concentrate improves dramatically.

When you notice that you are daydreaming or thinking about other things, try to figure out what actually triggered your loss in concentration. If you can pinpoint
the cause of your distraction, you’re only one step away from the solution. Hold
yourself accountable for your lapses in concentration find a way to overcome them. Remember, you can improve your ability to concentrate, but it is you who
must take the responsibility for doing so.

BENEFITS OF IMPROVED CONCENTRATION

• You’ll be able to make better use of your time
• You get more done during a study session
• Understanding better of what you read
• Help you take better lecture notes
• You’re better able to prepare for quizzes and exams

WHAT IS CONCENTRATION

Concentration is focusing your attention on what you’re doing. Concentration is
important in just about anything you do, but in this chapter we’ll focus on improving
concentration during reading, listening, and studying. It’s hard to describe
what concentration is, but it’s easy to explain what it isn’t. Consider the following
example. If you’re reading a chapter in your Sociology text, you’re concentrating on
it only as long as you’re thinking of nothing else. As soon as you think about how
many pages you have left to read, what time you’re going to eat dinner, or what the
professor will discuss in class, you’re experiencing a lack of concentration. If you
think about the fact that you should be concentrating on the assignment, that
means you’ve in fact lost your concentration.

THE THREE LEVELS OF CONCENTRATION

• Light Concentration
• Moderate Concentration
• Deep Concentration

THREE TYPES OF CONCENTRATION PROBLEMS

• Focusing at Will
• Sustaining Your Focus
• Limiting Your Focus

CAUSE OF POOR CONCENTRATION

When you find yourself thinking of other things, staring out the window, or being
distracted by noises around you, you may not be focusing your attention. You may
be having difficulty focusing at will, sustaining your focus, or limiting your focus
to only one task.

• Concentration Problems During Lecture Classes
• Concentration Problems When You Read Your Text
• Concentration Problems When You Study for Exams

STRATEGIES FOR IMPROVING CONCENTRATION:

1. Use Motivational and Organizational Strategies

• Develop a Positive Attitude Toward Your Work
• Create Interest in the Task
• Use Goal-Setting Strategies
• Use Time-Management Strategies

2.Create a Positive Learning Environment

• Find a Better Location
• Reduce Multitasking
• Minimize Distractions

3.Deal with Internal Distractions

• Deal with Competing Activities
• Deal with Academic Problems
• Deal with Personal Problems

4.Use Active Learning Strategies

• Strategies for Lecture Classes
• Strategies for Reading Text Assignments
• Strategies for Test Preparation

WHAT ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGIES ?

Organizational strategies allow you to organize the information to make it easier
to learn and recall. Tasks such as listing, ordering, grouping, outlining, mapping,
charting, and diagramming are all examples of organizational strategies. In each of these activities, you act on the material that is to be mastered. With outlining,
charting, or mapping, for example, you organize the material in a way that shows
how each component is related to the others. One of the advantages of organizational
strategies is that by structuring the material, you provide yourself with new
ways to remember many of the details. If you can remember the structure—the
main headings of the outline, the categories in your chart, or the web strands of
your map, for example—you’ll be able to remember many of the details.

AFFECTIVE AND MOTIVATIONAL STRATEGIES

• Affective and motivational strategies are strategies that relate to your attitude, interest, and motivation toward learning. They can influence how effectively you learn and remember information.

YOUR ATTITUDE TOWARD LEARNING

• Your attitude about learning the material can influence how well you’ll attend to it, organize it, and store it. If you’re trying to prepare for an exam, it’s important that you feel interested in the material and motivated to learn and remember.

MONITORING YOUR LEARNING

• Monitoring your learning also can be an effective motivational device. If you test your learning by covering the material and trying to recite the information, you’ll be able to evaluate your storage and retrieval processes.

YOUR STATE OF MIND DURING THE EXAM

• Your state of mind during the exam also affects how well you’re able to retrieve the information. If you experience test anxiety, you may not be able to concentrate on the exam questions. You may find that you’re so upset that you can’t think of the answers.

WHY YOU NEED MEMORY STRATEGIES

Now that you understand how information is encoded, stored, and retrieved, you
may wonder why you need to learn specific strategies to aid your memory. According
to Kenneth Higbee, “remembering is hard work, and memory techniques do
not necessarily make it easy, they just make it more effective.” To perform well in
college courses, you need to use strategies that aid the acquisition, retention, and
retrieval of the information that you want to learn. In college, learning to get information out of memory is just as important as learning to put that information
into memory.

WHY STUDENTS STILL RETRIEVAL AND FORGETTING

• Never really learned it
• Not understanding the information
• Cramming
• Stored with too few cues
• Interference
• Test anxiety

GENERAL MEMORY STRATEGIES:

• Spaced practice
• Break tasks down
• Repetition
• Overlearning

SPECIFIC MEMORY STRATEGIES:

1. Rehearsal strategies
2. Elaboration strategies