The flip side of not being able to make your own notes for your own learning is that you are less likely to read as much as you should. Independent learners must be people who are willing to read. They do not expect information to be given to them on a platter. They explore what they are interested in or what is important to them. They are seldom told what to learn. They decide what is to be learned.

But the absence of note-taking skills in anyone will deter him from making his own explorations. Text  becomes a chore because they would not know how to process what they read as they are so used to be given everything in neat bulleted form. This addiction to ready-made processed notes means that they cannot process and organize information on their own.  Reading would be difficult and a time-wasting chore because what is read is quickly forgotten without good processing of the information.For this reason, non-note-takers are poor readers.

A good note-taker knows that good processing of the information requires him to interact with the information, sifting out what is important from the unimportant, and organizing them so that it makes sense to him as he understands it. A lot of thinking is required and it is this thinking that will re-wire the neurons in the brain cells and help the brain make sense of what is read. This process is important because information only becomes deep knowledge to someone only if the person himself has processed the information. Reading ready-made notes processed by someone else makes it harder for the information to become deep knowledge. The reader of someone else’s notes only becomes a superficial learner.

The non-note-taker is a superficial learner because he does not undergo a richer learning process. He is only interested in an end product, not the process. The sifting and organizing of the information from the reading he would otherwise have to do himself are important cognitive processes that makes his understanding deeper. Worse, he will always be dependent on others. His learning will be crippled. He will nto be a successful life-long learner.

Does your child’s school teach your child to take notes? This may sound like a very trivial question but a school that goes out of the way to teach its student population the art and science of note-taking shows the degree of commitment that the school has towards teaching your child to be independent learner. The term “independent learner” or “independent learning” is often been used by schools to catch the attention of parents who want their children to have the virtues of an independent learner instilled while their children are in school. Parents know that this is one of the qualities that the future workforce is expected to possess.

Yet referring to my original question again, how many schools actually teach students to do effective note-taking? Note-taking is a basic skill that everyone needs if he is to be able to learn effectively. Through effective note-taking, the student learns to make decisions about what is important about the learning that he is undergoing.  Effective note-taking implies that a lot of thinking is done by the student to help him sort out the relevant from the irrelevant and to get the information into some organized and effective structure. A student will also be a very much more active learner if he makes his own notes. Independent learners need to be active learners, in fact they have to be pro-active about their learning.

But do schools actually encourage this pro-activity with regards to student learning? To put it another way, do schools actually encourage students to be lazy? The truth is many schools do, and this is true even of the  higher educational institutions. Teachers and lecturers have been guilty of spoon-feeding students with stacks of notes. Today, some educational institutions, like some the polytechnics in Singapore, take pride that their students can get access to lecture notes online. Pride in their new ICT ability to store notes online takes precedence over real learning in such cases.  It seems that today, even at the tertiary levels of education, notes are expected to be given out even though one would expect that at least at that level, students should be encouraged to be more independent and take greater responsibility for their learning. This spoon-feeding is often seen as “good” for the students because it helps the students pass the examinations because the lectures are usually geared to the questions in the examinations.

It seems that if the goal is to produce students who are examinations smart, schools will continue to dish out notes to their students. However, it ought to be noted that such practices do not contribute in any way to the making of an independent and life-long learner. Educational institutions must make a serious effort to get students to be independent learners. It reflects poorly on such educational institutions if the basic skills of independent learning is not emphasised.

Getting certification is so easy with testking 642-972 online training. Just download the testking PW0-104 dumps and testking E20-501 study guide to practice and pass exam on first attempt guaranteed.