Lecture Note-taking

Listening to lectures and taking good lecture notes is often quite a daunting challenge to many beginning students at Australian universities. You may be used to a situation where your lecturers or teachers not only speak quite slowly but also stop and repeat to allow time for you to copy everything down. This rarely happens in Australian university lectures and in addition, you will often have to adjust to many different guest lecturers, with different accents and lecturing styles. Many students initially find that the speed of presentation of information, especially combined with the use of overheads makes lecture note-taking a very frustrating experience. The following quotes from some international students beginning their studies at Murdoch in 2001 illustrate these points:

“...sometimes [I] can’t catch up with the speaking and can’t write and listen at the same time.”

“It’s difficult. It’s hard with so many listening, writing. The thing is when they put up the overhead, they don’t stop speaking, so we don’t know whether to copy the overhead or to listen. We don’t know whether it is important or not.”

However, by the end of their first semester these same students reported that not only had their skills improved and they could take better notes but they also found the lectures and the lecturers to be very helpful and to have learned a lot from them.

Taking good lecture notes