Psychlotron.org.uk Website Review

The handwriting of someone who doesn’t use a pen that often… I find it difficult to imagine a psychology teacher who doesn’t out of making them. I’ve been asked to develop some CPLD materials on the subject of notes so I’ve been trying to distil my ideas about this recently. What follows may be stating the obvious but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, since the obvious is easy to Working memory capacity is limited, and the encoding of stable, long term memories is a slow and cu*ulative process. Effective note making strategies are therefore important for at least two reasons. First, notes are a holding area for material that has been presented to students but which has not yet been encoded (fully) into LTM. If note-making is effective, the ideas are recorded in ways that they can make sense of and encode later. Second, note making is a process which helps students learn. It gives them opportunities to identify what’s important, construct meaning from it and re-encode it in ways that require de*p processing.   There’s a fair bit of research into the features of effective note-making, and relatively little of it will surprise anyone who has a basic familiarity with cognitive psychology. What follows is based principally on Beecher (1988), Marzano et al. (2001) and Marzano progress. Note making strategies should allow for the review and updating of notes, and teachers should plan for this as a distinct Students who include more information in their notes tend to learn more and learn better. It is becoming more common for students to create their notes using devices rather than writing them by hand. The evidence is against this. Although the typical student types faster than they write and therefore can record more (see point 4 above), students who type are typically focused on creating a verbatim record of what the teacher said and, therefore, are not particularly focused on making sense of the teacher’s messages (see point 1). Because hand writing is slower, students are forced to think harder about what matters and how