Defennder said:
Er, just to confirm what you just said. You said you had no time to prepare for lectures in undergrad but you had time to do so in grad school? I would have thought the opposite was more likely to be true.
My experience with grad school was similar. That's because you're spending only about half your time on classroom learning and the other half on research. With research, you have more time to multi-task...I could bring my reading material for my courses to the lab with me, and whenever I had 10 or 15 minutes of downtime waiting for a centrifuge run, or some reaction to proceed (or back in those days, a computer to finish crunching out a statistical analysis, or print out my assay results), I could sit and read.
Anyway, back to the OP, here's what I recommend to students as an ideal situation:
1) Read the textbook chapter before attending lecture
2) Attend lecture, and listen more than write. Only jot down things that are being emphasized, or that go over concepts you don't recall being covered in the textbook chapter, or things you didn't understand when you read the textbook chapter.
3) As soon as possible after lecture, go back through your notes and make sure they are clear.
4) If anything in the notes is still confusing, go back and re-read the textbook section on it with more emphasis of looking for the details. Add those to your notes for later review.
5) Do your homework assignments.
6) If you get stuck on homework problems, go back through your notes and the textbook sections covering those topics and see if you can figure out what you've missed, then attempt the problem again.
7) Review the material from the previous lectures and make sure you still remember how you did everything there.
8) Gather together any questions that you still can't understand, or haven't found the answers in your notes or book, or that are confusing, or where you have conflicts between lecture notes and the textbook, and either ask the professor at the end of the next class (if it's only one small question), or set up an appointment (if it is several questions, or a very complicated one).
In the not-so-ideal real world, I modify this advice:
1) Skim the textbook chapter ahead of lecture to know the general topics that will be covered and what order to expect them to be discussed.
2) Attend lecture, pay attention, take whatever notes you think is necessary.
3) Go home, try the problem sets, if you can't figure them out based on your notes, go back and read that section of the chapter thoroughly, then try again.
4) If you have to read a section of the chapter for clarification, add notes on it to your lecture notes.
5) Review your lecture notes from previous lectures.
6) If you're still confused, ask the professor.
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