I did an unpublished survey of my med school classmates, got a decent response rate, about 70-80% as a I recall. I asked how much time they spent on about 30 or so study habits, and then some demographics. One of the demographic questions was "which quintile of the class do you think you're in?"
So, not exactly awesome methods, but some promising leads. There was a lot "meh" in the middle, but, in order
1) review and condense your notes the week before the exam is the single best thing you can do
2) go to class, read the book, and make one set of notes (eg: take notes on the reading, then add targeted bits during lecture, or vise versa)
3) Do the assigned homework. Or, in the case of medical school, do a lot of question books and understand the answers (question banks are the staple of medical school, which is a whole 'nother post). Add what you learn to your notes.
3) If you can't go to class, listen to the podcast, but taking notes is critical, and whatever you do,
35) don't take notes on a computer. Perhaps partially due to WiFi access, going to class and typing notes was the worst idea you could have, actually worse than
33) listening to the podcast without taking notes and
34) going to class and not taking notes at all).
I also found there was a skew in the bell curve: completely innocent, one might expect people to evenly distribute among the quintiles, but there seemed to be a skew, which has been repeated in other studies: the top students slightly under-rate themselves, but the bottom students significantly over-rate their abilities, so there's a huge bulge in the middle, but it leans to toward over-confidence.
Applying Bloom's taxonomy(1), there seems to be a tactile-kinetic element to note-taking, and there's critical thinking involved in choosing what to write down, because you can't just transcribe the lecture and the book. There's further synthetic thinking when you try to merge class and book notes, and there is further synthesis when you build those notes into that a pre-test crib sheet.
If I were designing school from the ground up, lectures would be 20 minutes.
So, not exactly awesome methods, but some promising leads. There was a lot "meh" in the middle, but, in order
1) review and condense your notes the week before the exam is the single best thing you can do
2) go to class, read the book, and make one set of notes (eg: take notes on the reading, then add targeted bits during lecture, or vise versa)
3) Do the assigned homework. Or, in the case of medical school, do a lot of question books and understand the answers (question banks are the staple of medical school, which is a whole 'nother post). Add what you learn to your notes.
3) If you can't go to class, listen to the podcast, but taking notes is critical, and whatever you do,
35) don't take notes on a computer. Perhaps partially due to WiFi access, going to class and typing notes was the worst idea you could have, actually worse than
33) listening to the podcast without taking notes and
34) going to class and not taking notes at all).
I also found there was a skew in the bell curve: completely innocent, one might expect people to evenly distribute among the quintiles, but there seemed to be a skew, which has been repeated in other studies: the top students slightly under-rate themselves, but the bottom students significantly over-rate their abilities, so there's a huge bulge in the middle, but it leans to toward over-confidence.
Applying Bloom's taxonomy(1), there seems to be a tactile-kinetic element to note-taking, and there's critical thinking involved in choosing what to write down, because you can't just transcribe the lecture and the book. There's further synthetic thinking when you try to merge class and book notes, and there is further synthesis when you build those notes into that a pre-test crib sheet.
If I were designing school from the ground up, lectures would be 20 minutes.
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blooms_Taxonomy