In Singapore’s increasingly demanding education system, many students are finding it hard to cope with their studies, let alone excel in their exams. Due to this worrying trend, many parents have turned to tuition agencies or tuition centres to find suitable tutors to guide their children. In fact, by simply browsing the internet, you can easily find a tuition centre or home tutor Singapore is famous for.
However, not all tutors are effective in imparting the right knowledge and skills to aid students in their quest for academic excellence. While average tutors will use outdated teaching methods to guide students, exemplary ones inculcate tried and tested proven learning methods to aid students in understanding their topics and subjects better. One of the most effective methods a good home tutor will impart to students is mastering the art of using key points. Let’s go into further details about this learning method.
Writing key points is a very effective method to summarize huge chunks of data or information and to enable students to comprehend and grasp them more easily and efficiently. The steps are outlined below.
- Pick out a passage or a huge chunk of data or information that you wish to learn. Skim through the data/ information/ passage.
- Using a pen or a highlighter, highlight/ underline/ circle/ box the key major parts of the content that you have just read.
- Write down key points for the content preferably in one word or short phrases. You can number or list these points.
Let’s see how we can utilise the method above with the following example. Let’s say we want to write key points for the following passage:
“We have various types of negative misconceptions about learning that are buried deep inside our minds. As these misconceptions pile up over the years, they affect our abilities to learn efficiently, and distract the mind and keep it closed from any possibility in attaining super learner status. Due to this, you have to take control of your mind to overcome these misconceptions about learning, in order to strive towards being the best learner that you can possibly be.”
As you can see, there is a huge chunk of information to pick out from the passage. Of course, one way would be to remove unwanted parts of the sentences so as to summarise the passage. But even then, that still seems like a lot of data to absorb. Hence a sample of key points that we can come up with to further summarise the data are as follow:
- Self negative learning misconceptions
- Inside mind
- Limits potential
- Must overcome
- To become super learner
The above key points are definitely easier to grasp and understand as compared to the huge chunks of information in the previous passage. Of course, the above list of key points is not the only way to organise the key points and the opportunities are endless. The key thing to note when preparing key points is that they must be short, sweet but precise to facilitate your understanding of any information students wish to learn.