Mind Mapping Study Skills In Notes Taking

As a student, one is required to take notes during lectures or even while self-studying. Research studies have proven that taking notes not only makes the concept clear then-and-there but also facilitates recall during examinations. One of the main study tips, thus includes taking notes. Notes are taken either while listening to a lecture or while referring several books and accumulating them to prepare a comprehensive answer. Before exams, a review of these notes makes recall much simpler and faster! But taking notes is a skill that a student must develop and mind mapping is one of the excellent methods of taking notes.

Mind mapping is a diagrammatic method of organizing the key concepts or ideas from textbooks or lesson notes. In this method, a student is required to pull out the essential elements from linear material (i.e. lesson notes/ textbooks) to generate a mind map; this enables the capture of the gist on one screen which provides a movie-type insight into all the interconnected ideas. Moreover, mind mapping also encourages one to use the power of imagery to lay stress and association to your notes! Utilizing more of the visual mode in this method fosters the memory’s capacity to store and recall information.

Tips While Making Notes Using Mind Maps

There are several study tips that can be kept in mind while making notes using mind maps. Here are a few of them. Firstly, do not worry on how to pull out vital information from textbooks; most of them are well structured with headings and subheadings providing an easy framework in creating mind map branches. Secondly, let the mind maps build on themselves progressively through the study text; visualize your map expanding with more input. Adding details such as preferred shapes, images, colors and highlights helps a great deal in recollection of that information. Once you have finished reading, there is already a single mind map prepared in your mind, revealing all the vital information about the read topic. Thus, mind mapping not only helps increase volume of information but also ensures their clarity.

Remember, one never needs pages and pages together for effective study. Using the mind mapping technique, students can also summarize a lecture or lesson recently learnt; this in a way reinforces the learnt information. One can start by entering into the subject matter in the middle of the mind map with a central image. From here, main branches of the topic can be visualized with single keywords. Next step is draw sub braches from the main topics and label them. One of the study tips includes the addition to imagery to generate mind maps for a quicker recall.

Note that mind mapping involves the diagrammatic representation of the gist of the subject but you could include more notes. Interestingly, there are several mind mapping software available these days with the help of which a link to an external file can be given and after studying from that file, only the keywords would be required. Mind mapping is such a brilliant way to enhance learning and recall methods that it can be practically applied to any learning forms. It is effective not only for exam preparation, but also for essays and project works, brainstorming, presentation making, group study support, etc!

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