How to Take Notes for Learning

Original Editor - Robin Tacchetti based on the course by Michael Rowe
Top Contributors - Robin Tacchetti, Jess Bell and Kim Jackson

Introduction

We take notes for a range of reasons. They help us to learn, they improve our long-term retention of information and the enable us to record specific events or moments. Effective note taking requires learners to summarise important concepts as precisely as possible in their own words and to connect these concepts with lecture material. During the note-taking process, learners will interpret, filter and process information. This new information will be stored and retrieved at a later date when needed.

Why Take Notes?

Note taking has two main functions:

1. Encoding:
   • the listener has to actively engage with the incoming information when taking notes
   • they then need to make decisions about how to encode that material
2. Storing information:
   • note taking creates a record of information that be accessed at a later date
   • this stored information can be used for many different "post-listening activities and assignments"

Two reasons to take notes:

• notes can extend memory
• notes can enhance focus

However, it is important to remember that the most important element of note taking is the later revision of notes. "If you’re taking notes simply to capture the information that’s on the slides, or that you can read in a book, you’re not adding much value to your learning strategy because you can probably find that information somewhere else."

Types of Notes

There are many different kinds of notes, but five common types are: daily notes, temporary notes, literature notes, permanent notes and project notes.

• Daily notes
  • essentially a journal, diary or calendar
  • notes that are kept in date order to keep track of daily events
    • tasks for the day
    • reminders
    • random thoughts you might need at a later date
  • a place to record administrative aspects of learning (e.g. timetables, notes from meetings with tutors etc)
  • an extension of short-term, or working, memory
• Temporary notes
  • notes taken in the moment can be deleted once the information has been dealt with (e.g. sticky notes with phone numbers, emails etc)
• Literature notes
  • questions, comments, challenges you write to authors in the margins of books or in annotation apps when reading the Internet, or comments on social media
  • act as evidence of our critical engagement with creators
  • these notes often end up scattered everywhere
    • one solution to this is to use a resource manager like Zotero
• Permanent notes
  • the final version of notes taken during your studies
  • will use at a later date (even years in the future)
    • they are a distillation of your cognitive effort to deeply understand a concept
    • can be considered as an extension of your long-term memory
  • these notes have certain features to help them be more useful:
    • descriptive title
    • may have a short summary for longer notes
    • include relevant quotes from original sources
    • include reference list
    • digital notes may include tags for filtering and searching
  • note-taking apps like Obsidian, Notion and Logseq enable internal linking between notes
• Project notes
  • notes that are taken as part of a project/assignment
  • can be archived once the project is complete
  • tend to be a collection of notes, including administrative notes (e.g. meeting notes, to do lists), literature notes, annotations, permanent notes

Taking Notes By Hand Vs Using Technology

Mobile devices have been incorporated into the learning environment and are now used for note-taking. As Pyörälä et al. note, digital note taking enables students to retrieve information (notes / learning materials) anywhere, anytime, when studying and treating patients in the clinical practice.

As mentioned above, there are a number of apps to help with note taking (e.g. Obsidian, Notion and Logseq) and some students use their phones to take photos of notes on classroom boards. The speed and convenience of these technologies have inversely affected the amount of time students spend writing and most people can type faster than they can write.

However, it is important to remember that taking notes is not about the quantity or fedality of the information being captured. [...] Taking notes is about trying to link new, incoming information, to existing knowledge frameworks in your mind.

Taking notes on a laptop may mean that a student is able to record more information, more accurately (i.e. verbatim). However, these students may also spend more time multitasking (e.g. checking email, using the Internet, playing games etc) and, therefore, less time note taking, resulting in lower achievement. Moreover, there is some research to suggest that taking notes by hand might have certain benefits, including better long-term recall and conceptual understanding. However, it is important to note that the results in adult learners is somewhat conflicting.

• Horbury et al. found that while factual recall was not affected by the note-taking mode in children (e.g. handwriting vs using a computer), "children who handwrote notes had greater conceptual understanding one week after viewing their lesson, compared to those who typed notes."
• Longchamp et al. looked at adult learners' ability to learn new characters (i.e. letters) either by copying them by hand or typing them on a computer. They found that when characters were learned by typing, "they were more frequently confused with their mirror images than when they had been written by hand."
• Mangen et al. found that free word recall was better in adults for words that were written by hand rather than typed.
• Mueller and Oppenheimer found that students using laptops to take notes tended to perform worse on conceptual question than students who took notes by hand.
• However, Morehead et al. replicated and extended Mueller and Oppenheimer's 2014 study and found that, at present, "concluding which method is superior for improving the functions of note-taking seems premature."

Please see the following tables for a list of the advtanges and disadvantages of taking notes by hand and taking notes with a laptop.

Table 1. Taking notes by hand.

Advantages	Disadvantages
Better cognitive processing	Slower
Better recall of concepts fo longer periods afterwards	Less information captured
Better academic performance with conceptual questions
Able to draw
Able to make connections between different sections of notes

Table 2. Taking notes with a laptop

Advantages	Disadvantages
Higher fidelity / more accurate capture of information	More easily distracted
Ability to search digital notes more quickly and accurately	Less cognitive processing and analysis, so possibly lower levels of understanding

Note taking depends on the context and reason for taking notes. If the aim is to capture as much information as possible, it is probably best to use a laptop. If the aim is to remember content more easily, it may be more useful to write notes by hand. Michael Rowe suggests the following tips:

• When taking notes by hand, it can be useful to use a large format, hardcover, ring-bound notepad
• When using a laptop to take notes, it can be useful to use a plain text editor (e.g. Notepad on Windows) as there are fewer distractions in these programs.For more information on this, please see: Why Plaintext for Notes?
• It can be a good idea to take initial notes in class by hand and convert them to digital notes later
  • notes captured by pen and paper tend to be temporary notes
  • these temporary notes can point the learner to resources that need to be elaborated on in literature notes (also include critical thinking)
  • next, integrate the temporary notes and the literature notes into permanent notes, which are more fully formed and contain complete concepts and ideas from the lecture

How To Take Notes

There are many different note taking systems, but one popular method for learners in higher education is the Cornell method.

Cornell Method

This method was developed in the 1950s to help students make summaries of their learning. The main points, study cues, details and summary are all written down in one location. This method has a distinctive layout, with a single sheet of paper divided into columns. Each column and area has a specific purpose.

1. Cue column:
   • most important section - notes from lecture are written here, usually includes the main ideas
   • add a question for each note written; helps organise or remember the information
   • useful for review of notes
2. Note-taking area:
   • relevant questions or key concepts are recorded here
   • use of bullets, graphs, drawings or definitions
   • includes information regarding what is on the board or what the teacher / lecturer says
3. Summary area:
   • summarises the details of the note-taking area column into a few sentences to attain the big picture
   • aims to detail the essence of the notes on the page
   • includes key ideas that should be reflected upon

The Cornell Method is organised and easy to review. It allows the learner to extract key ideas and concepts. By limiting the space available, especially in the note-taking area on the left, the Cornell method aims to keep a learner's focus on the most important concepts.

Watch the video below by Cornell University for ideas on how students use the Cornell Method:

When taking notes, it might be useful to reflect the following questions:

• What am I trying to remember or make sense of?
• How am I going ot use the information contained in my notes, for later revision?
• What do I ultimately plan to do with these notes in the future?

Tips for Taking Better Notes

Michael Rowe has the following tips to enhance note taking:

• Always take notes to keep your attention focused and provide a structure when you revise lectures in the future
• You may only need to record a few of the most important points from a lecture, but actively taking notes will help you to connect new information to existing knowledge - capturing the most important concepts means you can elaborate on them later
• Avoid leaving out crucial details when taking notes - be as detailed as possible
• Listen for note-taking cues that signal important information is coming up
• Taking notes is only the first part of the process - reviewing notes is the second- but revising notes between writing and reviewing them can also be important
• If lectures are available as a recording, make sure to go through the content again to update your notes and make sure that you captured the major points
• It may be worth making a commitment to take handwritten notes even when you have a laptop

Resources

• How To Focus When Learning
• Creating New Habits For Learning