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To properly grok new information you need to actively engage with it

seedling learning elaboration grok meta make-public

Actively working with the new information facilitates understanding far better the passive noting down of it.

That's because when you translate the notes into the new context you need to understand the content first.

To be able to speak eloquently on the topic - write about it first

There is no secret to it and the explanation is pretty simple: Handwriting is slower and can’t be corrected as quickly as electronic notes. Because students can’t write fast enough to keep up with everything that is said in a lecture, they are forced to focus on the gist of what is being said, not the details. But to be able to note down the gist of a lecture, you have to understand it in the first place. So if you are writing by hand, you are forced to think about what you hear (or read) – otherwise you wouldn’t be able to grasp the underlying principle, the idea, the structure of an argument. Handwriting makes pure copying impossible, but instead facilitates the translation of what is said (or written) into one’s own words. The students who typed into their laptops were much quicker, which enabled them to copy the lecture more closely but circumvented actual understanding. They focused on completeness. Verbatim notes can be taken with almost no thinking, as if the words are taking a short cut from the ear to the hand, bypassing the brain.

When we try to answer a question before we know how to, we will later remember the answer better, even if our attempt failed (Arnold and McDermott 2013). If we put effort into the attempt of retrieving information, we are much more likely to remember it in the long run, even if we fail to retrieve it without help in the end (Roediger and Karpicke 2006). Even without any feedback, we will be better off if we try to remember something ourselves (Jang et al. 2012). The empirical data is pretty unambiguous, but these learning strategies do not necessarily feel right. Intuitively, most students resort to cramming, which is just another term for reading something again and again in a failed attempt to learn it (Dunlosky et al. 2013). And as much as rereading doesn’t help with learning, it certainly doesn’t help with understanding. Admittedly, cramming does get information into your head for a short while – usually long enough to stay in there to pass a test. But cramming won’t help you learn. As Terry Doyle and Todd Zakrajsek put it: “If learning is your goal, cramming is an irrational act” (Doyle and Zakrajsek 2013).

To properly grok new information you need to actively engage with it

Referenced in

To be able to speak eloquently on the topic - write about it first

When you write about the topic - you take time to deeply engage with it, creating and caching new mental models for the topic, developing novel thoughts.

evergreen notes should be concept oriented

It's more challenging to create a proper new concept note if you compare it to creating book-based notes. It requires you to come up with a good way to represent the new concept as a standalone entity and to link it to related concepts. But it's actually a good thing, as it makes such a note more useful - To properly grok new information you need to actively engage with it

How to Take Smart Notes

To properly grok new information you need to actively engage with it

use multiple levels of processing information for learning & understanding

To properly grok new information you need to actively engage with it and for material that you're reading this can be achieved by doing multiple levels of processing on it. Common suggested levels include

To properly grok new information you need to actively engage with it