Task completed!

Something I have been pondering lately has to do with a phenomenon I have really only encountered here in Loreto, Peru. I honestly don't know if it is common throughout Peru in general, or if it is just something that has become a thing here in the jungle region. But I had enough students in my 4 1/2 years teaching at the school here that came from other schools in the region with the same issue to make me think it is at least a regional issue. It is something I have given particular thought to recently because I am trying to help two students overcome the habit.

Have you ever witnessed someone write down an entire page worth of notes for them to get to the end and have no clue at all what they wrote down? Not even an idea on what the topic was in general? This is the peculiar problem I find myself trying to help two of my students with right now. When I first started teaching English here in Iquitos, I constantly wondered how my students could tell me that they didn't know how to do the work I gave them to do when I literally gave them everything they needed in their notes (including specific examples exactly like the ones they would be doing in their workbooks). It never occurred to me in the beginning that they could have written those things down and not have a clue what any of it said. It is even more confusing to me, because I am a person that has to write things down to be able to remember them. Even now, when my mom asks me to do things when I am with her in the US I ask her to send it to me because I will not remember it if it isn't in writing.

The older of the students I am helping through this situation explained to me one day that she has been having trouble taking notes for her classes that she is finishing up for High School. She told me that she has to make her notes extremely concise, because if anything she writes gets longer than a sentence, she immediately forgets it. No matter how hard she tries to remember, she can't remember the longer things. She switched from schooling here in Peru to an online US school several years ago and has been dealing with the problem ever since. She explained to me that the notes she used to take in school here never seemed to have anything to do with what ended up being on the tests, so she wrote the notes down to 'complete the task' and then immediately forgot what was on them. I also talked to one of her friends that is currently in online classes for a University here in Iquitos, and he said that he still does the same thing. He said that everything seems to be only important to his teachers in order to 'complete the task'. He said that once they complete a topic, they never seem to go back to that topic again as far as he can tell.

So, I have two questions based on all of this information. First, if everything is only seen by the students as important that the task is done, how is any real learning supposed to take place? Second, for a student that wants to change how they've been writing things down, is there a way to do so other than outright having to retrain the brain to do so?

Have any of you encountered this problem before? Or do you have any ideas or strategies that might be helpful?