“Bear in mind that”: Enhancing lecture comprehension through signaling importance markers

Appendix

A test of comprehension of important points in academic lectures:

Instruction:

1) Listen to and read the lecture transcripts below and identify the important points in them.

2) Underline the words or expressions that signal the importance in them.

A) the next thing he has to establish is the necessary animus the necessary intention can we say that Moran intended as the lawyers put it to exclude the world at large to prevent other people from getting access to the land including the county council itself there was no evidence that the county council had ever physically tried to get access to the land during this period but if they’d wanted to do so they wouldn’t have been able to they would have had to go and ask Moran for a key to unlock the gate suppose they could have er could have knocked the gate down or something of that kind but the fact that he had enclosed the land put this lock and chain in place was itself evidence of an intention to exclude and the argument here basically is that if you chain up a gate and lock it then by means of that action you’ve got prima facie evidence of intention to exclude part of the problem though in this case is the evidence about whether or not Moran intended to exclude forever the county council or just until the occurrence of a future event.

B) so that’s a little bit about the notion of correctness and the spirit of it okay now let’s bring this home a little bit more to think about the practicalities of er of er of writing for academic purposes and this tends to fall into two broad categories doesn’t it there’s the exam answer and there’s the essay and very often when you’re doing A-level the distinction isn’t perhaps too important you know the you get the chance in an exam to put down about three written pages and lots of people can get their pretty much total sum you know of knowledge and reflection on this book you know into that page perhaps you know er er er at A-level but what you will certainly find when you’re working at degree level is that you would never be able to fit in everything you’ve got to say and students are often very frustrated in their third year they put a lot of time and thought and there’s all kinds of exciting things going on you know in the Shakespeare course and and then they’ve got a three hour exam and they can’t you know they they can’t get it all in you see so what a little er it’s worth thinking a little bit at what the exam is actually trying to do and to distinguish that from what an essay er is trying to do and i think o-, what’s lurking here of course is the thi-, is the point that you are doing a very important and very real activity that many of you will go on in some form doing in the world afterwards but you’re doing it under very artificial circumstances you’re doing it to order on certain dates and suchlike so it’s the relation between the reality of the activity and the artificiality which is part of the problem the artificiality is there for a purpose just as it there for a purpose in poems it produces a concentration that you wouldn’t have you know without that as well as all the practical er reasons about you know doing something together and i think the way to think about exams is perhaps something rather like this you tend to go into the exam very often thinking there’s some ideal answer or that somehow you’ve got to pack into a few pages w-, what you might have put into m-, m-, m-, m-, many thousands of words in an assessed essay you know you’re trying to get everything into this little pot you see now i think the way to think about exam answer is perhaps something er rather like this i-, i-, i-, when you go out into the world afterwards let’s say you’re er acting for a union or you’re a teacher you’re a lawyer whatever kind of person you are who has a special skill a special body of knowledge enabling you to make informed judgements of things and people will come to you and they’ll ask you questions and what they will want is a pretty economical but useful answer that is like a kind of iceberg you know there’s a lot there that you know that you don’t tell them but you organize that knowledge internally in such a way as to give them what they need from where they’re coming from whether it’s a child in a classroom or or whoever it may be you see and if you think of the exam answer as a kind of practice in doing that and if you think that two or three pages of writing are not too different from a few minutes of speech you perhaps begin to get the feel of how an exam answer works it’s not a test of your complete knowledge by putting it all out in the shop window it’s a test more of your implicit grasp of the subject.

C) so here we’ve got er a a concrete example of how adverse possession actually works in practice and someone acquires rights as a result of of that adverse possession i think it’s important to say that it’s actually quite rare in practice for people to have their claims sustained by the court in other words these tests of factual possession intention to possess a twelve year period and adversity are actually quite difficult to maintain in practice one reason is that Buckinghamshire County Council here are are clearly being being negligent with regard to to their use of land they could have effectively brought the issue to a head much earlier by bringing a claim to possession within the twelve year period or just by giving Moran permission to continue using the land until er they needed it that would have brought the adversity to an end if they had actually written to him er and said well either er er we’ll either take you to court or we’ll give you er er permission to continue to occupy the land er until we need it either of those actions or those interventions would have been sufficient to bring Moran’s claims to an end so it’s quite rare for these things to run on for this length of time where it most commonly happens is in relation to disputes over or er uncertainties if you like with regard to the boundaries of land and you can see this as a as a kind of extended example of that the area of land is is probably in this case is probably larger than those in most cases but where er er a fence has been put up it’s two or three metres to the left or the right of where it should be then and that situation is allowed to rest and to continue that is the most common type of example in which you actually find adverse possession working today er the other example that i’ve got in the case in in in in the cases in the in the materials of Hyde and Pearce shows an example of of a claim to adverse possession er not working despite what seems to be fairly outrageous behaviour on the part of the person who comes to own the land er i’m going to have to bring it to an end today to allow you to have your staff-student liaison committee elections but i’ll talk a bit about Hyde and Pearce at the beginning of next time.

D) yesterday i started by talking or i finished i should say by talking to you about the different classification schemes that are available clinical classification schemes that are available for AIDS diagnosis and for monitoring the progression in the disease and you remember i said to you that there were two schemes there was one developed by the Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta and then there was a second scheme developed by the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington the atla-, the the C-D-C scheme was based primarily on clinical observation so it was not terribly laboratory based whereas the Walter Reed scheme was more based on measuring clinic-, you know measuring clinical parameters in the laboratory over the years since these two schemes came available it’s the C-D-C scheme that has gained common usage and you remember hat it’s divided into four stages one through four and that i finished yesterday by talking about stage one which is the acute or primary infection stage and i said to you that during this period that people were seroconverting they were they’d been infected they were seroconverting the important thing to remember about this stage is there is a large viremia and so that at this stage the people are probably at greatest er chance of passing on the infections to others but in fact in the majority of cases they will not themselves at that point know that they are actually infected so the point at which they constitute the greatest risk to society in terms of passing on the infection they are probably completely unaware that they are infected themselves okay stage one is of course followed by stage two stage two is the asymptomatic infection phase so that’s the phase along here in terms of time and whereas stage one is measured in terms of weeks so really anything up to about sixteen to twenty weeks that sort of period stage two is measured in years and its its length is unpredictable okay so it’s difficult to predict how long stage two is going to be for an individual the key thing about stage two is during stage two although the people are infected they are well they are ge-,in general terms healthy now clearly if you are someone that who is infected the thing that you want to know more than anything else is how long am i going to be in stage two if you’re going to be in stage two for thirty years you’re probably not going to worry too much about being infected ‘cause you’re probably going to die of something else before you come down with AIDS but if someone says to you well you’re likely to be in stage two for about two-and-a-half years given that you’ve almost certainly been infected in mid-adult life in the in the period twenty to forty then if somebody tells you that you’re going to come down with AIDS in two-and-a-half years that’s clearly much more profound effect on your life than if they’d said to you you were going to come down in a-, with AIDS in in thirty years so clearly one of the things that that people have looked for in trying to study this infection is prognostic indicators of the length of period of stage two so are there any indicators are there any clinical indicators of the infection that allow you to predict for an individual how long they are likely to be in stage two well what can we say about the length of stage two i’ve said it’s in years what do we know about the numbers well in the early days there was a study done of six-thousand-seven-hundred homosexual and bisexual men in the United States over a period of eighty-eight months now that’s about seven-and-a-half years these people were all infected they were all H-I-V positive at the point when they were taken into the study.