is an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at Saint Louis University School of Medicine in Missouri, US. Her research focuses on the use of effective learning strategies and individual differences in learning. She is a member of The Learning Scientists and co-author of Ace That Test: A Student’s Guide to Learning Better (2023).
Notetaking is a versatile skill. Perhaps you take notes during lectures in class, or as part of your job, or when you’re reading an insightful book, or when you have an important meeting. If you’re a notetaker, in any case, you want your notes to be as useful as they can be.
And that starts with thinking about their function. Since taking notes is such a common activity, it’s easy to overlook the question of what notes are actually doing for us. Many people assume that just by writing information down, they are doing something useful.
But the cognitive processes involved in taking notes and the way you take them can make a big difference in terms of what you ultimately get out of them. There are two broad goals of notetaking: recording and learning. The first is when you try to take down as much information as you can so that you don’t miss anything and can review it later.
This might be necessary sometimes – for instance, if you are going to be tested on the information presented in a lecture, and you won’t have a recording, text, or slides to refer back to later. Similarly, if you are in charge of meeting minutes or want to do more research on what you’re hearing from your doctor, you may need to simply record as much information as possible. But in many situations, the most effective and efficient way to take notes is to treat them as a tool for learning: that is, to use them to help you retain and understand the information by putting it down in your own words and organising your thoughts about it.
This is the kind of notetaking that I’ll focus on in this Guide. What do good notes look like, and how can you get better at notetaking? There is not one right answer to these questions, but knowing a bit about how and when notetaking is effective will help you to decide what kind of notes to take when, and what to do with them afterward.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
