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Bootcamp 2012 — Day 3: How to take notes (and which common technique you should never use)

Today I’m going to talk about how to take notes, specifically what you should do to be hyper-effective when watching lectures or reading books. More importantly, I’m going to let you know which techniques science tells us are ineffective, so you can stop wasting your time.

For the non-students following along, this matters to you too. These techniques can help you remember more from books and articles you read, so you save time and learn better.

What Most Students Get Wrong about Taking Notes

A trap many students fall into, which I’ll describe is the “transcription strategy”. This is where, like a courtroom stenographer, you try to write down everything that was said, exactly how it was said.

Indeed, many popular notetaking systems are built on this principle, encouraging you to take exhaustive notes that basically contain the lecture’s content transcribed into text.

A big reason for this was that you were expected to study from your notes. If your notes were poor, and you forgot or misunderstood an idea, you would fail.

I’m here to tell you that this idea is out of date. For most students, getting access to raw information is never a problem. Google and Wikipedia can give you hundreds of articles and videos that cover the same topics. Often textbooks cover nearly the same material as the course.

Except for the 5% of classes where it is truly impossible to find the information outside of the lecture room, transcription isn’t necessary anymore. If I forget a calculus rule, I can just use Wikipedia, I don’t need to pour through my notes.

The problem with the transcription strategy goes deeper, however. In addition to being superfluous in most classes, it can actually cause you to learn less.

What a Relatively Unknown Study Tells Us About Taking Notes

In 1969 James Jenkins and Thomas Hyde conducted a study on memory. They took students and gave them a list of words. From there, they were split in two different ways. First, they divided them into one half which was told they would need to remember the words for a later test and another half which wasn’t told to memorize the words.

Second, the students were given a task while going through the list of words. One half were told to make a mental note of whether the word contained the letter ‘E’. The other were asked to decide whether the word was pleasant to them or not.

The results were fascinating. It turned out being warned about the upcoming test didn’t make any difference on the students’ results. Motivation, it turns out, didn’t have a large impact on memory.

Instead, the orienting task given made almost double the difference. Students told to reflect on the pleasantness of the word recalled almost twice as much as the students told to recognize if the word contained an ‘E’. This was true whether or not they were warned about an upcoming test.

The difference is attributable to a psychological effect known as depth of processing. Deeper levels of processing, such as determining whether a word is pleasant or not, have much better results for memory than shallow levels of processing, such as noticing letters.

This suggests if you want to remember more from a lecture or book–don’t transcribe! Transcription is a shallow level of processing, which could be only half as effective in recalling information later.

A Better Way to Take Notes

In Learning on Steroids (which I’ll be reopening once this bootcamp has finished) I discuss flow-based notetaking and active reading. Both of these are built on the principle of getting to deeper levels of processing.

Getting into too much detail is beyond the scope of this short bootcamp, but here are some broad tips you can use to take better notes:

• Put the ideas in your own words. Summarizing (not transcribing) forces a deeper level of processing.
• Draw connections between related ideas.
• Make extra connections. Does a lecture reference an idea you’ve learned previously (but the professor didn’t explicitly state)? Jot down the connection.

Let’s be clear, transcribing is definitely better than taking no notes at all. At the very least it keeps you focused on the lecture content.

For 5% of classes, this method won’t work. The lectures are just too information dense, and the content of the lecture cannot be replicated elsewhere. For those cases, transcribing may be your only option.

In mathematical or technical classes, the professor may do a derivation or proof on the blackboard. Generally it’s better if you can narrate the reasoning behind each step, instead of just copying the symbols, but sometimes the professor may move too quickly to do this well. In these cases you might have to transcribe in the class, and annotate later.

Why You Should Never Just Highlight

I used to believe highlighting was okay. After reviewing this research and others, however, I’m inclined to argue that you should never just read and highlight a textbook.

Highlighting is a very shallow level of processing. It also pushes you to look for definitions and terminology, instead of reflecting on the ideas in a deeper level.

If you’re going to highlight, you should always be taking sparse side notes when you read. Even better, if you do a one-paragraph summary after each section, you’re forcing yourself to process the information and reflect at a much deeper level.

The only caveat to this would be for digital books where highlights allow you to save information for later. I sometimes use this if I know I may want to quote a book in a future article, so I highlight it on an eReader for quick searching. But this isn’t for learning purposes.

ACTION STEP: Day Three

Now ideally you’d want to remember and use this methodology next time you’re in class or reading a book. However, I’ve often found this leads students to fall back on older transcription (or worse, no notes) methods when in their actual classes.

Instead, I want you to take the momentum of reading this article and apply it immediately on something where you don’t have pressure. So here’s today’s action step:

1. Find an online video teaching something you’ve wanted to learn. If you’re not already self-studying an online class, Khan Academy and Coursera are two great (free) starting places that have videos only several minutes long. Perfect for practice.
2. Get a notepad and practice taking notes for the video using the methods we discussed.
3. If you get stuck, default to trying to rewrite the main ideas, in your own words. That’s a basic tactic that can work if you’re not as well versed with flow-based notetaking strategies.

This should take less than ten minutes, so you have no excuse for not doing it. And please don’t wait until your next class! Practicing a technique is much easier when you can pause and restart.

That’s it for today. Tomorrow I’ll be back with more tips and information about Learning on Steroids, the full course from which this bootcamp is just a sample.