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📖 Table of contents
This blog post was written by our medical student in Bratislava, Isabella Raber.
A popular learning method among pupils and students is summarising the learning material. It provides a good overview of the material relevant to the exam and summarises the most important information in a document. In this way, you don't lose valuable time searching back and forth between presentations and books, and you can study for the exam in a goal-oriented way. However, in order to create a successful and good summary, it must first be well planned so that it is clear and compact. With certain tips and templates, this can be done easily and will soon become routine after a little practice.
The right approach is essential
Summaries can be created in many different ways, but they are all based on the same basic principle, namely to focus on the main points of the learning material and to summarise them briefly and concisely. First of all, it is important to get a general overview of the learning material. You can do this, for example, by reading through a list of lectures and topics that have been covered up to this point. Try to link the topics together in order to better understand the overall picture. In addition, you can avoid including unnecessary information and keep your summary clear.
Filter and compress
Now comes probably the hardest part: filtering and compressing important and unimportant information. It is not easy to distinguish which facts are relevant and which are too detailed. Ask yourself which contents are most relevant for the exam, what the respective teacher or professor emphasises and which topics you should learn first. One system that can help you is to learn "from the inside out". This means that you start by roughly writing down the topics and only add details that seem really important to you towards the end. In addition, you should not include big explanations in a summary, but keywords that encourage you to "recall" the topic. In an emergency, you can always look up words or principles you don't understand. After all, a summary is not meant to be a non-fiction book.
Find your optimal method for writing summaries
Now to the actual writing. There are some good methods to rely on. Visual learners learn better with flowcharts and mindmaps, while reading type learners learn better with summarised texts. (To find out which learning type you are, you can check out our blog post on different learning types). In principle, almost any method of summarising can be adapted to one's own learning type, for example by including more pictures and structure tables, or by writing down more bullet points.
The Cornell Method
One method of arrangement is the Cornell method. This method was introduced in the 1950s by Walter Pauk of Cornell University in the USA. It is a special form of text division. The page is divided into three parts: On the left half of the page, keywords, questions or general terms are to be listed, while on the right side notes on the respective learning material are to be written down. In order to test your knowledge yourself, you can use this method to keep the right side closed and try to tell as much as possible about the keyword. In the lower third, there is a short summary of the page. This should contain short notes and terms in order to be able to see at a glance which topics have been dealt with on this page.
List questions as a method
Another method for writing is to list questions. This encourages active recall of information and is therefore a good method for memorisation. For each slide or section, a question is formulated that relates to the content. For example, for a section on the liver, you can write down the following questions: "What are the functions of the liver and what are the common diseases of the liver? Afterwards, you try to answer these questions yourself and write down rough key points. In this way, you do not passively summarise the subject matter, but actively learn along with it. If you can answer the questions well, you are well prepared for the exam.
Finally, do not underestimate the time needed to prepare the summary. Good preparation makes learning easier and ensures that you don't lose the overview. However, you should look at the amount of learning material in advance and plan when to summarise which topics, because without actually learning and repeating the information written down, the summary would be pointless.
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