The Surprising Truth About Note-taking During Lectures
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- Опубліковано 18 тра 2024
- My argument on why the conventional wisdom on note-taking - particularly during lectures - is wrong.
00:00 Introduction
1:25 Does the writing process help us remember what we heard?
1:44 Does reviewing notes later help us remember?
2:07 The missing piece.
2:55 An alternative method.
3:56 Is taking verbatim notes useful?
5:02 On paying attention to the right things.
5:46 Taking notes during vs after a lecture
6:46 My recommended practice
Ryhan Hussain's channel: / @ryhanhussain
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References:
A lot of the recent research on note-taking has been on whether taking hand-written notes or laptop notes are superior. The evidence for one being better than the other is a bit "meh". As mentioned, the idea that "verbatim notes are bad" seems less true for laptop note-takers.
The opening quote comes from:
Flanigan, A. E., & Titsworth, S. (2020). The impact of digital distraction on lecture note taking and student learning. Instructional Science, 48(5), 495-524. bit.ly/3RiWQWE
The second quote comes from:
Morehead, K., Dunlosky, J., & Rawson, K. A. (2019). How much mightier is the pen than the keyboard for note-taking? A replication and extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014). Educational Psychology Review, 31(3), 753-780. bit.ly/3CYdgzf
Experiment 2, here, is also the one that I relate where "no note-taking" performed just as well as any of the note-taking conditions on immediate tests. It's unclear to me why they didn't also use a delayed measure with the no note-taking group. Also, looking at tables 3 and 4, you can see that if students took notes on material germane to the test, then they did well (my second concluding point).
Another recent piece is here:
Luo, L., Kiewra, K. A., Flanigan, A. E., & Peteranetz, M. S. (2018). Laptop versus longhand note taking: effects on lecture notes and achievement. Instructional Science, 46(6), 947-971. bit.ly/3Qw24xb.
The introduction is a fair summary of the mixed evidence on the encoding hypothesis. Unfortunately, they only used immediate tests here, but there's some interesting material on the relative benefits of hand-written vs laptop notes.
Below is a more direct test of my suggested approach. The results? Note-taking beats testing on immediate tests, but in two weeks testing wins. Testing even beats note-taking + review, suggesting that the storage function of notes is not particularly strong.
Rummer, R., Schweppe, J., Gerst, K., & Wagner, S. (2017). Is testing a more effective learning strategy than note-taking?. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 23(3), 293. psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?do...
And here is another that finds no difference, even though students who took notes during the lecture took more relevant notes than those who took notes after the lecture.
Haynes, J. M., McCarley, N. G., & Williams, J. L. (2015). An analysis of notes taken during and after a lecture presentation. North American Journal of Psychology, 17(1). bit.ly/3CUqAEL
And another old piece, same thing, no difference (only the measures weren't great).
Eisner, S., & Rohde, K. (1959). Note taking during or after the lecture. Journal of Educational Psychology, 50(6), 301-304. psycnet.apa.org/record/2005-1...
Certainly students seem to believe that note-taking during lectures improves learning outcomes:
Morehead, K., Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Blasiman, R., & Hollis, R. B. (2019). Note-taking habits of 21st century college students: implications for student learning, memory, and achievement. Memory, 27(6), 807-819. bit.ly/3cKGVBg
On the superiority of free recall / retrieval practice / testing, over re-study, see:
Roediger III, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). The power of testing memory: Basic research and implications for educational practice. Perspectives on psychological science, 1(3), 181-210. linguistics.ucla.edu/people/h...
Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger III, H. L. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. science, 319(5865), 966-968. psychnet.wustl.edu/memory/wp-c...
Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger III, H. L. (2007). Repeated retrieval during learning is the key to long-term retention. Journal of memory and language, 57(2), 151-162. citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc...
My psychology professor doesn’t send us the lecture slides before class, and she actually encourages us to listen rather than take down notes
I hate that! My professors never ever send anything bf hand! I find it useful so we can come with questions. If I ever teach I’ll be so organized and ready my students will love me.
That's horrible! Tell her that people learn at their own pace and in their own order! She sounds like a narcissist Hopefully I'm wrong! 🙏🏾
wtf are the replies complaining about that sound chill
@@T1Oracleyou can't just conclude someone is a narcissist from 2 sentences
@@T1Oracle mdfk the professor are teaching in psychology.
This only works if you have time to do free recall after a class. For those of us who have class after class without a good 15 minutes in-between, doesn't work that well
I never use more then 5min on this and think it's still very helpful but I never was a note taker so I am used to study with very little to no notes
Which might suggest that the class provider isn't doing their job well? It would be an interesting exercise to speak to your university/college about this and ask whether they'll adjust the programme. Evidence based learning is supposed to be a cornerstone of academia, at least.
I think longer gaps are better. Sitting down after school or on the bus would work as well.
@@pauljefferies5837 I think they are likely in high school. Very little wiggle room in that schedule.
On top of this I also have this same issue where you have to be on top of taking notes if you want to get the proper formulas or the step by step of examples for later use since many professors where I’m at don’t post examples, several don’t have a textbook, and a few don’t even post their notes. End of last semester I had a class with no posted notes, no textbook, and no posted examples, which is why I kinda think this whole “just listen instead” doesn’t work.
Everything here perfectly dovetails with my observations in 20 years as a teacher. However, there is this huge issue with attention: our whole K-12 system (and maybe higher ed--I don't know) is now so focused on the idea of the product, and this whole transactional relationship where the student pays for grades by turning in assignments. For so many students, their attention span is so short that they really struggle to think past "what's due today?" and if you tell them to just listen and think, they don't take that seriously. There's no product. And even if they know a recall opportunity will happen later, that's a next-class-me problem, or even a latter-this-class me problem. This mindset can be fixed, but it's a process, not a one-time lecture at the start of class. It frankly takes most of the year for most students. So if I tell them not to take notes, but to pay attention, they just stare off into space (or look at their phones, or whatever).
Basically, the current model is deeply invested in the idea that teachers can use instructional design to "force" attention and processing: Cornell notes, graphic organizers, demonstrations of learning, etc., etc., all take it as given that higher order thinking has to be forced out of kids through some sort of product that we can assess. Students then, of course, play the game we set up: they find cheats and hacks to create the product without the thinking--from their point of view, this is being efficient. They think the product is the point, because no one has ever said otherwise. So we try to use more and more clever instructional design so they can't "beat us", and we become obsessed with stopping "cheating" instead of noticing that no one is really learning. And if there is no "product" due, they think that means that what we are doing isn't important.
That's a lot of a rant, and I apologize, but do you have any recommendations for concrete things kids could "do" during a lecture to help keep them focused (or, as we say in K-12, "hold them accountable"?). I keep thinking of things, but in every case it seems like they will just see that task as whole point. I do explicitly address these ideas as part of my teaching practice, but it doesn't move the needle until well into the course. Can you suggest anything to help them listen attentively in the first half of the year?
Thanks!
Interesting points! I'm beginning my methods classes for a P-5 degree & licensure in Ohio. I wanted to comment because we are specifically being taught that lecture is the least effective way to teach elementary students, and we should keep it to the bare minimum. The pedagogy we learn nowadays includes inquiry-based learning and lots of small group interaction.
So, to your point, holding attention (at least in P-5) during a lecture isn't the goal anymore. The goal is to deliver information without lecturing. So, for example, we can demonstrate one new math problem and have them turn and talk with small whiteboards to try one on their own, then pull their attention back to discuss their work. This way, students generate their own knowledge rather than falling into the old listen/retain/regurgitate pattern which you've pointed out isn't ideal.
@@a.brennick6342 This is a good example of why it's madness when they try to lump K-12 together. Building your own knowledge gets less and less feasible as you move through the curriculum: you just can't discovery-learn your way through AP Chemistry in 250 minutes a week. Lecture may not be effective, but it can be very efficient.
I mean, our whole scope and sequence was designed around a more passive learner model. The rate at which student learn different concepts and the best order to sequence them in is inevitably going to be different when they are building understanding, but their is a lot of institutional weight behind our current structure.
More than a rant, these are brilliant observations coming from a reflexive professional stance. Kudos to you, your students are fortunate to have you as a teacher
As a student, I find large lectures incredibly ineffective because they (the bad ones, anyway) remove the student from the learning process entirely by assigning them the role of voiceless audience member. Students are going to learn better if material is presented as a dialogue rather than a monologue. Good teachers are ones that will give students space to ask questions and be willing to answer all questions in depth, even if strictly speaking they aren’t part of the predefined curriculum. The best teachers construct lesson plans so that the student’s questions “coincidentally” move the lesson forward in the direction the curriculum intends.
The trick is obviously convincing students to participate in a way that feels comfortable for them, which at best is going to be difficult and at worst completely impossible based on the class size and personality of the students/their past experiences.
I've been punished repeatedly in school for not taking notes because "that means I am not listening" and now at uni I find that taking notes makes everything worse - I can't remember anything and I don't understand what I wrote. the problem is that the material presented during lectures often includes calculations and proof techniques (pure math) which I could use later in homework or that without notes I won't know what to look for in textbooks. taking photos of the blackboard helps a bit, but it's not perfect because deciphering what was written presents yet another challenge. I wish there was a solution to this, it seems like a problem very specific for math and probably other stem fields
I'm not sure if this is what you're experiencing, but I know that the transition from high school math to undergraduate math is challenging for a lot of people. Keith Devlin, among others, has written about this. bookshop.org/p/books/introduction-to-mathematical-thinking-keith-devlin/8606510?ean=9780615653631
I have two suggestions, but I'm not sure either one will help. Is it possible to prepare beforehand, especially to familiarize yourself with a couple of examples of the to-be-discussed proof technique(s) so that it's not all new when you first see it in lecture? Most professors would probably welcome a request like, "would it be possible to share the proof techniques you're going to discuss ahead of time?" (if it wasn't already apparent from the syllabus). The other thing I wonder is, can you get a classmate or small study group together to help decipher what was written after-the-fact? There's a decent likelihood that with all your heads together you can figure it out, and it's a good learning experience to boot.
As for people getting on your case about not taking notes....🤷♀️ Just one of those things we have to tolerate sometimes. There are lots of people in lots of subjects who don't know what they're talking about. Maybe a pencil in your hand would get them to lay off, even if you didn't take many notes with it. Good luck!
@@benjaminkeep I wonder if some kind of collab with The Math Sorcerer UA-cam channel would be a possibility to look at the math side of this more effectively. They're both a professor and a self-studying mathematician.
Thanks for the suggestion - I'll check the channel out.
Hi, I also study maths. What I find works for me is to write references and step-by-step what's being done. Not the whole integral, but a "takes this and goes to that" kind of note. The name of the theorem, proof strategy, or method. What f us up sometimes is the different notations and theorical approaches, but with a bit of patience you can separate what you need from the rest of details. Some other things, like more general approaches to proof problems, you'll eventually learn from exposure. There are some things so abstract it's best to slowly but consistently just read, acknowledge and move on that to try to encapsulate and study on their own. I hope it helps.
i will ramble a bit:
i think this is where using laptop notes could help. i’ve read before that laptop notes are worse than handwritten notes, but i think this is a different story. the goal is to have something to fill in what was missed after free recall sessions. touch-typing also means you can look at the board at the same time as taking notes.
if you type little enough and fast enough, you can synthesize during pauses, so that you can ask meaningful questions to the professor.
notation is not important. the mathematical objects have names. Theorems have names, but some propositions don’t (this is where synthesizing information helps to name propositions).
the other commenter said it well: focus on proof strategies and methods (like the reasoning for each step in the proof)
i’m 1st year math undergrad so if anything i said doesn’t apply to you, i am very happy to hear your side!
During my university time I feel my note taking has helped me tremendously. There were so many instances where professors would drop some super useful extra information that was not in their script, that was helpful in the exam or at least for a deeper understanding. I definitely would not have been able to recall all of those after a day of lectures.
I feel like the main problem with the studies is, that they don't differentiate between good and bad note taking. If you write down all kinds of stuff that you really don't need and keep distracting yourself by doing that, then yeah you will end up worse than if you just listened.
But there is no way you wouldn't benefit from some efficient note taking.
This has been my experience too. I do not know if note taking from books or slides helps much but most lecturers give far more information 'off-script' so that note taking is absolutely essential. Recordings and transcripts are not always available and there is no way I can remember every single detail after a lecture to be able to write down all the important details from memory.
This is what is called anecdotal evidence
@@colbypyles3831 This is what is called individual experience. What I'm saying is don't stop taking notes because some studies show that "on average note takers don't perform better". If you know how to take proper notes and you fell like it benefits you, don't stop
@@colbypyles3831As someone who takes notes- I agree. I mean it's really all about how you take them.
@@colbypyles3831Yes, but if it is working for you and you are getting good grades, please don't force others to do differently.
This should be a concern only if you are not getting good grades.
I noticed this in high school in the 70's. I never took notes. My classmates couldn't understand. I asked them about what was on TV last night and they had 100% recall of their favorite show. I said if you can remember what you saw on TV you should be able to remember what the teacher says. Later I realized they were suffering from a conditioned response, since they were little they were forced to sit still, a very uncomfortable thing for a child, and exposed to 'learning', and so they developed an association between pain and learning that caused them to shut down whenever exposed to anything that cued that response. My response to the torturers was to rebel, I didn't take notes, didn't do the work, but I consistently got the best grades because my coping mechanism of rebelling actually helped me to relax and just listen to what was presented.
I had a kind of similar experience, but 40 years later. For most of my early years I went to a kind of hippy alternative school that didn't tell us to take notes or any of that stuff. Through this I learned to master the lost art of "just paying attention." When I later joined the more traditional school environment, I was really puzzled by the concept of note taking. Why are you writing this stuff down when the teacher is right there? I kinda just assumed that it was something for try-hards who take everything too seriously, but as I became more aware of the way the world works, I learned that this was not the case.
I now occasionally take notes on things, but not just in a way that's limited to the classroom. I've got the names and functions of enzymes written down next to directions to an address, or a new recipe I want to try. I write down the information that I actually plan on using again. If you wouldn't write it down outside the classroom setting, then you don't need to write it down inside a classroom setting.
Or most probably you just had a bigger IQ and better memory than other people and that explains everything. And indicates the survivorship bias as in what helped you will not necessarily help others.
I still wouldn't be able to tell them about what I watched last night. I forget a LOT of things. I take notes because it is interesting and I enjoy it. However, in my lectures now, I can't take notes because the lesson is in American Sign language and I can't exactly write that down...
I noticed last year that I virtually never used the notes I took during class anyways because typically they were incomplete anyways. I could just refer to the textbook or internet to fill in gaps in my understanding. When I stopped taking notes I didn't notice any effect on my performance and found it was nice to just listen.
That's exactly what I experienced, even before I went to uni. If it's not incomplete the explanations are just not helpful because I didn't have time to think about it. So I also use books only to study and it works perfectly fine.
Naturally. Whoever wrote the textbook had a deep understanding of the topic, and weeks to write each chapter. You're learning the topic for the first time, and you're trying to keep up in real time.
Notes taken in class are a reliable indication of the topics that might come up in the exam. So long as they are not so incomplete that a whole topic is missing you can then refer to a text book to fill in the gaps.
Textbooks for detail; notes specially for exam revision topics; but for actual learning and understanding nothing beats talking to fellow students afterwards about the lecture content (intermingled with the social chit chat about football or who fancies who etc)
If you had figured out how to take good notes, it might have been more effective.
@@zanido9073 This is kind of hilarious because high school students seem to rarely have textbooks for their classes, or at least rarely use them. So they have yet to learn how to effectively learn with the textbook.
My friends always ask me how I do so well. I always say pre-read the resources the professor gives before class, then just listen during the lecture and try to relate what they’re saying with what you read.
but the thing is notes arent for understanding, it's for later. Like I am really curious how do you revise? Lets say a month after your exam is going to take place. How do you study if you didnt take any notes? I dont want to take notes either because sometimes I miss important topics while taking notes during class but I am afraid what will I revise before exams
@@fckingfardinx4100 when it comes to exam taking, if you understood the lectures, just trust your gut and you’ll do fine.
@@fckingfardinx4100 and I just don’t study. My homework’s are my “study time”.
@fckingfardinx4100 well here's what i think, first you must review the topic before the lecture and try to understand the topic beforehand, second start note taking during the lecture but only the extra things that weren't included in lecture you studied (this also applies if the lecturer gives a better idea to understand what you studied previously in a better way), third is to use spaced repetition so that you don't lose all information that you already had at your disposal, fourth is to study multiple topics that relate to each other so that when you're studying a topic you and then study other topic you just remember the first topic and can link these two together, hope those tips help
I feel like this is different for math classes, as it is important to document the steps a professor does to solve a problem
I respectfully disagree. I find it better to focus and try to understand what the teacher is doing while it is happening, than simply document what is being written down. Most of the time the proofs can be found on the textbook. Furthermore, doing the proofs again on one's own can help immensely with understanding of the material.
@@aquilazyy1125 valid. I guess it depends on how the individual learns best then
Not for me, I learned like this in any class, especially math and got my math minor. Definitely depends on the person. All I did was listen, and take a picture of the board just in case, and I only reviewed probably 5% of the pictures I took.
at the same time, what ive found to be quite effective (as long as the process needed is not TOO long) is that recalling the method in a free recall style, actually help a lot more whilst you are attempting say a similar question.
I think that for math or physics it's essentially listen when the teacher is making proof, get the final formula and either find the proof in the textbooks or try to get to it yourself by getting the first premise the teacher gave.
I can't help but wonder about 2 points regarding the studies:
1) Which topics were these studies about?
2) Did they test selective note-taking vs verbatim note-taking vs free recall? Or include selective note-taking at all?
I ask this because when I did my bachelor's in computer science and math, I found a distinct gap between two kinds of courses:
The first kind is "theoretical" courses, mostly in math, where I basically had to do selective note-taking in order to process the definitions, proofs, and concepts.
The second kind is "practical" courses where I would do very minimal note-taking and refer to existing slides if I needed to (given that they existed). In this case, what I did during lectures was mostly sit and listen, processing the concepts in my head while taking notes on the general topics so I could basically do "intermittent free-recall" during the lecture.
All in all, I wouldn't completely discount selective note-taking, but I do think that free recall has potential in select topics, given that the student is capable of doing so without using it as an excuse to just zone out during the lecture.
because videos about the correct answer of: it varies (based on nature of class, supplementary materials(slides, is the textbook good)) and how the individual student has trained their memory recall areas: doing/repeating, listening, seeing
are not controversial, or support a survivorship bias, and thus get less views
I always found that drawing or doodling in my notepad was way more effective than anything else. Of course I was undiagnosed for ADHD until I was 20 so I really needed the extra stimulation from doodling to be able to pay attention.
Me too! I was always a poor student, but my most successful academic year was spent taking notes from the book before class, then doodling in a notebook and listening to the lecture, taking lecture notes as needed in a third notebook. I had 3 notebooks per class that semester but my grades were great! I 😄
Yes, I don't think this video was made with neurodivergent students in mind. Sitting and listening attentively doesn't work for me. Doodling can definitely be a help. I've even had some open-minded professors allow students to knit during their lectures. Whatever works!
Yeah, same thing here, "just listen and pay attention" doesn't really work for me. I need to be writing or squiggling something otherwise I just zone out completely. I don't even think about reviewing notes afterwards
I independently came to this conclusion in the last week of my first semester of uni. Everyone I knew thought I was mad. When I didn’t get very good grades first semester, everyone used it as a “I told you so” moment.
In the next semester I pre-read the lecture notes, didn’t take any notes during lectures, and referred back to the recordings if there was anything I still didn’t understand afterward. Very simple, and a lot more enjoyable as I could focus on what the lecturer was saying without having to stress that I might be missing any key insights.
I improved my grades massively in the second semester and in the following years, getting better average grades each year. I ended up with a First Class Honours degree, and a nice “I told you so” moment for myself.
When I did my Master’s (in a completely different subject mind you), I did the same thing. I took no notes. Again, everyone thought I was mad. I graduated with Distinction, with multiple grades in the high 90s in classes, and even some 100s. Taking no notes is the best studying tip for uni I can give someone.
It's inspiring.❤
People probably just thought that you were a genius or something and kept taking notes anyway
So basically you read the material before the professor explained it?
@@robertomascetti670 Correct, but also did not make notes during the lecture.
@@britishtf2 thx. I had to make sure I understood lol
What I did throughout college was I would listen when the professor introduced a new concept, and then I would write down what they wrote down on the board when they gave a little pause. I was a math major and math professors are usually very good at teaching and understand they need to give their students a moment to get everything down. I definitely needed to take notes because if I missed something, I wouldn't be able to reference my notes when doing homework
Wish our prof understood that. He covers like 10 new things within 5 minutes and he writes really fast on his iPad (it takes a minute to even understand what he wrote) which shows up on the projector and he doesn't even share all the proofs and examples he covers in class.
I always thought that letting students make a small notecard that they could bring to the test was a great idea. It gets them to study and summarize the important bits. And as a student it kind of feels like you're getting one over on the system. So it's kind of like tricking students to study by pretending they're cheating.
The most effective method I've found is to _actively think about the topic_ and _make connections_ to other things you've learned. You're not just strengthening your understanding of that one topic, but instead _several_ topics _and_ compressing the information you need to remember since you can share information between previously seemingly unrelated concepts.
I was terrible at summarizing things, so practically all my notes were verbatim, and i did actually interrupt classes several times while copying down slides. Naturally this didn't happen as often when I wasn't taking notes, bit i should also mention that you _should not be afraid to interrupt the lecture (at least in a grade school setting; it's much harder in larger college or university classes) specifically to ask to clarify a concept or word, or to confirm a connection made. Looking up confusing words after the fact 1) requires actually remembering the exact words to look up, and 2) only helps yourself. If you can get the teacher to elaborate on the concept in front of the whole class, then _everyone_ in said class will get the benefit of said elaboration.
This. This was a turning point to me. The thing that really bothered me for so many years was so easy to understand. I would get so anxious trying to think of a way to know if I had leaned things that studying became a LOT more frustrating than it should be.
Now, when I just try to understand the material without notes I get so more in touch with them it's crazy, studying became like a game I am trying to win every study session, and you see that it works because you are trying to make sense of all that info and not just simply trying to remember a bunch of things. Now I can happily say that I have found the right way of studying
Love you videos, they are just so damn good and interesting
Exactly, I do the same exact thing, except I've done it for basically my whole education. The problem is some teachers used to grade notebooks*, forcing me to sometimes write, and my parents were never happy that I wouldn't write. Years later, I turned out quite fine, I'm currently going to one of the top schools in the country (certainly best in both mathematics, physics, programming and electronics) and I still don't write a lot, but teachers at least act like we are adults who can decide for themselves if we want to write or not. Parents still don't like it, but hey it gives results, so they learnt to live with it.
*got the worst or second worst grade every single time bio teacher was grading notebooks, and even though I knew it very well, I almost had a worse grade because of notebooks
I was wondering if you could share how you review information and study for an exam when you don’t have any notes beforehand to look at? Whenever I learn something new or finally grasp a tricky concept I always feel the need to write it down so that my future self can review and recall it. However if no note taking or limited note taking is done, how does the process of recalling and restudying information before an exam or after a long period of time work for you?
On thing that annoys me about such studies, or videos covering such studies, is that I don’t believe I have ever heard it being taken into consideration what the student thinks helps them the most and why.
Different people find different things help them in different ways. I for one have really bad attention and concentration issues. Like I’m taking pills for it now as an adult, finally! But growing up I had to come up with solutions, and one of them was taking as detailed notes as I could because to be able to write them, I needed to be listening. Eventually I would be invested and focused in the lecture and wouldn’t need to take any more notes. This was not something that I thought about, it was just something that happened. But the initial notes were necessary to get to that point.
Anyway, after a while, in college, ideas where taking notes was “actually bad” started to get in vogue and I pretty much got convinced to stop taking notes for a couple of years. It was much worse. I was convinced by the evidence that was shown so I tried to pin it on everything but the actual source as did all the people who convinced me in the first place.
It took me a while to eventually start taking notes again, but eventually I did and I get a lot more out of things that I need to listen to.
So this would be what I would tell people: if a study confirms something that you know about yourself that people bother you about, then great! You now have support for what you know works for you. If a study says that something that you know works for you ‘does not actually work’ try not doing it for a bit but, if it did actually work for you, go back to doing it. Don’t let a study of people who may be nothing like you affect what you know works.
I feel like you arrived to your conclusion without really considering every factor to why note taking can be beneficial. Learning is something everyone kind of approaches in their own way and there really isn’t a fixed formula. For example i like to take notes because if I don’t my mind tends to shift to other thoughts. I try to understand what is being said and write down only the core ideas. This forces me to pay attention at all times. If something isn’t super clear during the lecture, i’ll just write it out verbatim and go back to it later. In 95% of cases this is enough to understand the topic. By having the notes always handy i also save a lot of time in the long run, not having to go through (buy) books, find and rewatch recordings… and if the topic is specific you can forget about finding it online easily. While what you say in this video may apply to some, if not most, it shouldn’t be used as a general rule.
Its also dependent on the content being studied. If im studying anatomy, having diagrams, dot points and flowcharts im scribbling out while the lecturer is speaking, it helps me understand and SEE the concept. As opposed to relying on my mind to visualise it all. But if its a cultural topic or historical topic, dot points of key parts on my laptop suffices to save time for revision of every week of content
I find notes essential as a STEM student and find myself referencing back to them often. Of course there's better and worse note taking systems but once you find one that maximizes your individual learning, it's an incredible resource.
Well said. I personally have had much better outcomes from taking notes versus just listening, but I suspect that's due to my ADHD. Listening attentively for an hour or more simply isn't going to happen!
I never learned any of this when I was in high school or college in the mid- to late-eighties. The thought of not taking notes listening to a lecture or a podcast or even reading a book is scary. This must take lots of practice. I struggled a lot in school trying to remember things; obviously didn’t learn much. Thanks for these insights!
I just want to thank everyone who is posting their thoughts and questions to this comment section. I've been reading the comments, some of them provide insight into my own problems and provide solid advice!
Sincerest gratitude to Dr. Benjamin for this video and also taking the time to answer everyone's questions.
When I was in college I recorded lectures whenever my professors let me so I could take notes off of the recording. This was especially helpful to gain understanding of concepts I did not grasp immediately. I would just repeatedly listen to the section and if I still couldn't understand the concept I would go and talk to someone who did to get clarification.
I used to write down everything to prevent myself from drifting off (my mind is all over the place) and two semesters ago I really noticed how much having to split my attention like that tires me out. Like, it feels more than twice as exhausting even though my attention is only split two ways.
Now, I just scribble down occasional points of interest or proof sketches to keep my attention present, but largely just focus on the lecturer.
I think this is highly dependent on what course you’re taking. Also - does the professor provide notes you’re supposed to copy? Because if so, those are likely to be on tests in the future. Learning to pay attention to what’s really important is a key learning component for lectures
In all my lectures we have prior readings. I find that whenever I do the readings and take notes while I read, it becomes much easier to follow the teacher during the lecture and all the notes I take there will only reinforce or "argue" with the notes I had taken before the lecture. I never do free recall afterwards, and this method has worked wonders for me. I guess one fact he didn't mention in this video is that people are more or less visual/auditory, and therefore find it easier to process information in certain mediums.
Nooo not learning styles 🤮
I've got ADHD and never took note until a week ago (4th year of college, writing on a laptop with obsidian) and honestly I like it, I can't hold my attention by just listening and taking note really helped to just listen
I very much noticed this also. When I was in my grade school years I would rush to take down notes fast during lectures but in High School, I stopped and realized that taking down notes lessened my participation and caused me to focus on taking down notes and not actually digesting the information
2nd UA-cam recommendation from your channel. Great video with scientific points and arguments. I'm currently procrastinating when my assignment is due tomorrow. I will consider binging all your videos after my assignments are done.
I was a verbatim note taker. The lecture notes and the textbook were my only source of information, and if I didnt copy down everything I could from the lecture, I would miss it or forget it, as my memory isnt that great. Also, I didnt have any friends in my major, so I couldnt get notes from them. However, I recognized that I was missing something from every lecture, since as was stated my attention was split while writing. In addition, I wasnt even good about reviewing lecture notes, or the textbook, because I spent most of my time solving engineering homework word problems. I certainly didnt have time to prepare before the lecture. So in conclusion, looking back on it, I realize that I should have been just mostly listening to the professor's lecture, and writing minimal notes, then doing Free Recall right afterwards, as was proposed by this video. I dont think that I would have done Free Recall that well, as my memory is only so so, but it would be better than not doing it.
I like what you said about active recall and putting the pressure on your brain to remember things after a lecture. One thing that is helpful to talk about is recorded lectures. I think recorded lectures are a wonderful resource and are much more useful than live ones. You can listen, pause, take notes, rewind, play again for comprehension, and continue the lecture. I feel like recorded lectures are the best form of learning outside of youtube videos and demonstrations because it really helps to dig deep into the topic and make sure I fully understand what I am learning. If I don't fully understand what someone said, I can pause, google up some terminology, take notes or make a flash card, then continue on with the lecture. It has helped me tremendously to build my knowledge of subjects I'm not interested in, like Trigonometry, or Chemistry. At the same time it gives me a resource to go back and review when I need to refresh my comprehension. I think notes are very helpful but you have to be smart about how you use them.
Dude, I like your videos because you always confirm and validate the way I've always studied my entire life. And I've always been seen as a bad student... Now I know they were all wrong! thanks for that.
For many people with aphantasia and hypophantasia, taking notes is essential in order to lock information into memory. I have hypophantasia/borderline aphantasia, and I simply don't remember things just from having seen or heard them. I need to convert the information into semantic form and rehearse it repeatedly. I've found that taking notes is an excellent way to help myself encode memories. The act of writing something on paper seems to lock it in, and I also have a record to refer to when studying.
Well said and explained!
I remember being so used focused and used to taking notes, that one time when i forgot my notebook, I almost gave up mentally to just listen, cause I felt like there was no point. But in that class, I could fully just focus on the lecture without worrying if I have missed writing something donw.
Game changer. Also LOVE your videos!
Thank you for your analysis and for including references to sources. Subscription earned.
I did very poorly in history classes in school (which, it turned out, was due to a pathological deficit in narrative memory). The one history class I did pretty well in was a college course that was popular enough that it was broadcast on the local radio station. I'd record the lectures at home, and listen to them several times. This nailed down my retention of the material in a way that a once-through (with or without notes) never did. I expect that taking notes between repetitions would help even more, since I'd be able to recognize where there were holes.
Thanks for the video !
When I was a student, I hated to take notes because it was ugly to read back and I couldn't focus myself on UNDERSTANDING what was said rather than TRANSCRIBING it.
Also, I feel like I am more of a hearing kind memory.
2:21 EXACTLY!!!!
Needing to write down information while simultaneously listening for more to write down is just way too complicated.
But also, not doing this results in forgetting most of the information you took in.
So no matter what you do, THERE IS A HEAVY LOSS.
Yes, multitaking is almost impossible. But I still think it's better than nothing, cause practise makes perfect.
However I will still do nothing to "take notes", since I found (without inspiration, and through personal experience) that over 4 years of doing nothing of 'noting' my grades have improved by simply paying more attention.
Only bad thing is I can't recall things from previous years, since I have no notes to look through.
In our intoduction to University, there was a learning expert. And he told us, to form groups and sacrifice one Person to take notes, while the Rest of the group listens. And After the lecture, we should meet and explain to to the Student, who took notes, what he wrote
We did this sometimes. What happened was that we had a hard time explaining things as good as the professor did.
That's definitely beneficial since explaining the material well enough to someone means u understand it urself
@@nicolasmateogarciaguzman7897 Well, then the advice actually worked (if you tried to do the research on the things you failed to explain in the beginning and eventually succeeded in doing so).
I just take notes on everything: lectures, recorded lectures, video instructions of the textbook, the textbook.
I run out of notebook space quickly but repetition of the same ideas is the mother of learning.
and having redundancies makes reviewing easier for me.
Both my thermodynamics and organic chemistry sends us notes before the class. A lot of the students download the PowerPoints and write the explanations in the document. During clases I spend like 90% of the time listening and no more than 10% or maybe 5% of the time writing. When the professor finishes explaining a concept or idea, I write down with my own words what I understood. When the class finishes or later that day, I spend like 15 minutes reading the pdf and adding examples, relationships and explanations that didn’t ocurre to me while taking notes or were too long to be written while the professor was speaking. It works great.
Greetings from Chile🇨🇱 !!!
super cool video ! i feel like i got a lot of insight into why i stopped taking notes. i did 2.5 years of history & philosophy (undergrad) before transferring to teacher education (high school history) and i don't take notes anymore. unlike my girlfriend in stem (biology), i don't really have closed-book exams and much of my learning is based around oral communication & self-directed projects (creative alternatives to essays). because i don't take notes and there's no competition element to my classes (pass/fail), i feel like i'm more present & able to ask questions/connect lecture topics to things i've read outside of the syllabus
I stopped taking notes when I realized that I never go back to review them.
I was preparing for JEE, in high school i took notes of each word in classes. Failed miserably. Then in this drop year, i stopped taking notes just writing headlines or reference from book for short notes to revise . This is saving my time,better recall and i feel less anxiety. You're a lifesaver doc🙂👍
You are preparing for jee it would be very tough
Konsi college hein bhai
I remember everyone in my science classes in high school used take notes (as the teachers encouraged). I never took any notes unless the teacher literally stood over me and forced me to. In fact I spent the majority of my time reading books or just listening to the lessons. While reading books is by no means a good way to retain information, I definitely believe that just listening to the teaching and then just trying to apply it to questions in my head, helped me a lot. I was at the top of the class for most of my time pretty much till the very end.
I stopped taking notes at one point and it was the best thing i ever did. i could pay attention more and really take in the lesson as opposed to just trying to write everything word per word and not retaining anything. when it came time to studying, most profs now post slides online, so you can use that to study. having actually gone through the material one time during the lecture also reduces the need to study. if you're missing anything for an assignment, all of the info is in the class book or online
one issue with this is the profs. they see you not taking notes and keep insisting you need to. a lot of prof are confused when they see you just sitting there. wondering how you do it. one asked me if i just borrowed other ppls notes, which i didn't, but is another way to get notes for the class.
the best part about not taking notes is, most of the material builds upon the previous stuff, so if you understand how the first half of the lecture works, then the 2nd half is easier to understand. so if you're sitting there just writing notes, you aren't understanding the first half, so when the 2nd half comes along, you're understanding even less and what you're writing is almost jibberish. this means you need a lot more work to understand the material after class. this gets compounded if you dont have time to review your notes before the next class, and you have even more material you dont understand that you need to understand the current lecture.
I found for all my conceptual studies at university (education related topics, science theory stuff) I would end up with 20-40 words in my notes. Headings, people, things that seemed important or ah-ha moments as I listened. When doing maths/physics application everything was copied, because finding the same 'technique' later was very difficult when solving problems, so I wanted that referral. But finding someone to explain 'what' things were that I had textbooks, videos, and office hours for rechecking.
A nice clear video that explains what I try to teach my students every year as they approach senior levels, so thanks for that.
When I have taught classes, I created lecture outlines with they key points already documented, and plenty of white space for the student to make their own annotations as they deem necessary, and passed those out to the students before the lecture. Then, I delivered the class using that outline for the delivery. This way, they can focus on the content and class discussion, not on taking notes. Today I would offer electronic versions of those not just paper ones as was appropriate in the past.
I scored plenty of A+s and i was busy taking lots of notes at 6x speed in my physics undergraduate years. May not work for every lecture ofc but it works for me. listen, understand, write very fast at the same times, summarise it later to revise as needed to recall the lecture and do additional reading and invest lots of time and effort in completing assignments or lab work reports ofc.
What would you recommend for medical students in terms of note taking during lectures, specifically first year MD students, who often don’t have a lot of prior knowledge heading into each lecture, have 4, 45-minute lectures back to back, daily, and don’t know exactly what they will be tested on in the qualifier at the end of the course?
I’ve recommended doing some priming, before heading into the lecture through a third party resource that aligns with the lecture topic, reviewing the lecture slides and marking up concepts that are still difficult to understand after engaging with the third party resource, and then annotating on those specific concepts during lecture. For this level of professional studies, do you think it’s realistic to have them free recalling after every lecture? How would they review this after?
This makes a lot of sense to me. I hardly ever took notes in school yet I still passed the vast majority of my tests, and often by a decent margin. I guess I was just paying attention to the teacher more.
The best method I ever found during college was to take short hand, salient point notes that took no more than 5 seconds to write. These were descriptive enough to allow me to remember the point in the lecture it was addressed but short enough that I could write them down without missing what the speaker was saying. I'd normally have about 200-300 words by the end of a 1 hour lecture which allowed be to recall the information that the speaker deemed important. In 4 years of college I did not even fill up a 70 page notebook with notes.
I'm really glad that, in 12 years of school, I'd always been taught to take verbatim notes and only now I'm learning better ways of learning
Gonna apply it tomorrow! :P
Thanks for the video!
Thank you, Benjamin!
I'm 36 years old. I have never been able to take notes. Not at school, not at uni (got a MSc), not at work.
I can't do it.
Everytime I try, I end up not being able to pay attention to what is being said.
Very early I realised that I couldn't, but also that a lot of what people say in lectures/class/meetings are not that important. Somethings said are more important than others.
So very early as a kid, I learned to recognize key piece of information, and when I could disconnect my brain. I would use those moments of "downtime" to think about what I just learned and wrestle with those ideas in my head, connecting that with other concepts I already understood.
I don't know if it's a better way, I just know that I cannot do any alternative. My brain just doesn't allow it.
Exactly my problem in school and uni. I refused at some point to take notes and started just listening. And boy did that help!
Excellent content as always
The reason you’re getting pushback from the math people here is that math lecturers often use really weird techniques in the algebra. And math books don’t explain the algebra, and if you can’t find a UA-cam video using the exact same trick, you are screwed. And often times, that weird trick will play a prominent role in the exam.
Fair enough! This is probably something that is true of all of my videos, but what I present is what I think is good "baseline" or default advice. Some contexts and situations call for deviating from that advice, and this sounds like one of those - pay close attention to identify the trick, write it down.
@@benjaminkeep It's worse than that. Upper-div and graduate math courses are often taught without a textbook, so the lectures are your only source for that presentation of those specific topics. It's very unlikely that you're going to remember the details or even the structure of a dozen different proofs that get presented in a single lecture, so you have pretty much no choice but to be a stenographer.
Exactly! This problem is way too specific and none of the study channels talk about it (probably because there are so few math majors or graduate students). I’ve noticed a lot of the study advice on YT comes from the med school or law school people - which is heavily focused on memorization and pretty much useless for math. Yelp!
This should have been out 20 years ago when I was in college and didn't get extra credit in the class for "taking good notes all semester". I figured out pretty quickly if I paid attention in class I didn't have to study very hard. And my notes were only to cue my memory on what was said in class.
For me taking notes was always to communicate to the professor that I cared about what they were teaching. I would always try to get to class early, sit in the front, and take notes. This helped me more than once when I had to ask the professor for help or an accommodation. I would sometimes review my notes if there was something I couldn't recall, but that was not very often.
I have always been a bit partial in regards to taking notes. It helped me last year for the 2 semesters that I was taking but I really can't say how much it helped as the years before that I never did any note taking whatsoever and still passed with results that are comparable or better than my peers. I will sat though that the only parts of the notes that I took that really helped me was really a small fraction, if anything taking notes likely helped me not fall asleep during class rather than for information lol. One thing that I wondered as the video played though is that does it make a difference if you can take notes while you're not looking at the book itself, so you're putting most of your attention on the lecture while letting your hand scribble any words that you can catch. This is what I did for a lot of the lectures in my previous year and the notes do look rather messy but I could still read them
This validated my worries so much...I always panic when taking notes in class, and sometimes those notes aren't even good quality (missing important info, or highlighted stuff that I thought was important but really wasn't), and I kinda recall highschool, where I wasn't so pressured by future tests and I did so much less note taking, and did well on the test anyway (I did had to study hard for some subjects though, like Geography or History. No one is free from studying lol). I kept comparing those two and thinking if it was viable to not take notes in college, and this was the answer I needed
Plus I talked to my friend about this and she told me I worried too much 😂😭 I'm gonna send her this to show her I found what I was looking for (btw i know it may not work for me, i'm not gonna get mad at you if it doesn't work hahah you're just a youtuber)
@@vale4364 still you have to worry less
-with love, your friend.
@@marielpizarro2115jijiji
:grins: I was happy to see that towards the end you covered the circumstance of oldies like me whose studies took place in the Before Times, where your lecture notes were a vital resource that helped you focus down your reading to the most relevant parts of the most relevant sources.
I guess my ADHD forced me NOT to take any notes during lessons. It was kinda a way of forcing myself to pay fully attention to the lesson, and not distracting myself breaking my attention between paying attention and writing stuff.
Yeah I get that. Same with me!
I am not an expert, just a curious human who has been learning how to pay better attention in lectures. I may be wrong about things, but I will update my schemas if confronted with contradicting information! Here are some tips I've collected:
1. Be kind to yourself
- If you get distracted and space out, it's okay! Gently guide your attention back to the lecture.
2. Try practicing mindfulness meditation
- Do this outside of class You need to use all your attentional capacity for the lecture itself during class.
- Over time, practicing focusing on breath strengthens the parts of the brain responsible for regulating attention
- Consistency is key for this neuroplasticity
- I know that saying "Just be consistent" doesn't work. So, what are some actionable steps you can take to help with consistency?
- Schedule times into your day to practice mindfulness meditation
To help with scheduling (which is hard for a lot of people), pair it with something you already consistently do, like taking a lunch break.
3. Nourish your curiosity
- Humans are naturally curious about lots of things!
- Turn things into questions to engage curiosity, which makes it interesting, which makes it easier to pay attention because you aren't fighting with yourself.
Do you have any other insights or tips? I can use as many as I can get!
I remember, in class everyone got a worksheet, where you wrote down notes or just circle in our cross out the correct answer. Way easier to follow. Also when writing down, everyone has to be quiet and gets a couple of minutes to write something down or to do an exercise. In hindsight, what I could have done better is to use earplugs.
You're presupposing perfect attention. Taking notes does different things for different people. I, for instance, am not a group, but my attention can very easily be triggered to wander, no matter the subject or its "importance". Taking notes keeps me in the moment. I can also see the structure of the lecture afterwards, whereas due to the idiosyncratic nature of my attention, and what I may or may not focus on at any moment, this would not be possible to do by free recall afterwards.
I never took notes until college. I tried for the first two years and my performance was abismal. My junior year, well late sophomore, I decided to go back to my old habit of doing homework during dead instruction time, and paying actual attention the rest of the time. My GPA jumped half a point with an additional 4-7 credits per semester and much more sophisticated material.
I do this still in my professional career, to the initial irritation of my coworkers. It still blows their mind that my memory of a conversation from 6-8 months ago is better than their notes.
Hi Ben! Thanks for putting out these videos, I have found a lot of really helpful info here which has improved my study process as a student physical therapist, as well as given me ideas for how I might go about helping my patients with skill acquisition in the future. One thing I'm curious about (perhaps a topic for a future video) is how successful are lectures as a teaching tool in the first place? And, what separates good lecturers from bad ones? My intuition based on my experience as a student and undergraduate chemistry instructor is that lectures mostly suck, and that good lecturers are a) very interactive with their students and b) conveying a clear narrative that synthesizes the material covered in a memorable and concise way. Doing a little dive into the literature myself, but I lack the context (and time) necessary to really make sense of what I'm reading. Thanks again!
Your experience does not deceive you: lectures mostly suck.
Lectures require no active cognitive processing by the students (they can be entirely passive) and the lecturer does not learn what the students know (and what they don't know), so the lecturer can't adapt to how the students are learning. Lectures also seem to mimic "vigilance tasks" (like radar monitoring), which results in steep drops in attention 10-30 minutes into it. Lectures follow from the "information deficit" model of learning - that learning is basically about information transmission. Needless to say, that's not how learning works.
This is compounded by a misunderstanding that the problem is just being engaging. So if you're witty or you have cool stories or if the students like you - those are the keys to better lectures. But improving lectures is more about organizing the content, understanding the students' prior knowledge (through diagnostic tests, for instance), managing cognitive load in other ways (give students time to digest and take notes rather than barreling through the material), using various active learning techniques (e.g., short group work problems, clicker questions, asking them to make predictions, facilitating self-explanations, low-stakes quizzes), and choosing appropriate examples that structure their knowledge growth appropriately.
If you're looking for advice on improving lectures, see the two pieces below.
This is a recent piece that gives plenty of good advice:
Cerbin, W. (2018). Improving student learning from lectures. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, 4(3), 151-163. doi.org/10.1037/stl0000113
And this is an old piece with plenty of good ideas too.
Gibbs, G., Habeshaw, S., & Habeshaw, T. (1987). Improving Student Learning During Lectures. Medical Teacher, 9(1), 11-20. doi.org/10.3109/01421598709028976
Here are a couple of large meta-analyses that look at active learning in STEM fields at the undergraduate level (and the weakness of lectures compared to just about any other thing):
Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 111(23), 8410-8415.
Theobald, E. J., Hill, M. J., Tran, E., Agrawal, S., Arroyo, E. N., Behling, S., Chambwe, N., Cintrón, D. L., Cooper, J. D., Dunster, G., Grummer, J. A., Hennessey, K., Hsiao, J., Iranon, N., Jones, L., Jordt, H., Keller, M., Lacey, M. E., Littlefield, C. E., … Freeman, S. (2020). Active learning narrows achievement gaps for underrepresented students in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and math. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(12), 6476-6483. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1916903117
On the link between vigilance tasks and lectures: Young, M. S., Robinson, S., & Alberts, P. (2009). Students pay attention!: Combating the vigilance decrement to improve learning during lectures. Active Learning in Higher Education, 10(1), 41-55. doi.org/10.1177/1469787408100194
@@benjaminkeep Thank you so much for the response! Always nice when the evidence aligns with experience. The similarity to vigilance tasks especially rings true, I've noticed my peers tend to flip between verbatim note taking and completely disengaged.
Thanks for sharing the articles, these are quite useful.
+1 for having go in the background. I take minimal to zero notes. I like having slides to preview the class and to sometimes filling gaps. Paying attention to the lecture is key.
Very late in the game, but _not taking notes_ served me well throughout my education. Firstly because it have me liberty to actually think about what was being told and secondarily to only look up what I found to be surprising or counterintuitive after the fact. Which usually amounted to no notes at all, just the living memory of where learning happened.
you should talk about typing vs. writing notes. But I feel like based on experience, you remember more stuff from written notes. Also, from my experienced typed notes tend to be more organized when looking back at them later.
I always take notes during the lecture the first time, accepting that they will be terrible. As someone with ADHD, my problem with recall is that I forget things really, really fast. My brain is perfectly good at juggling; it's designed for that. So I can almost always catch things the first time. I am also really good at interpreting things fast, so I can do a little bit of preorganization. But I can read a paragraph and immediately forgot what I read, so anything like recall after a lecture results in nothing. So I always take some form of shitty notes during the lecture, and then I compare them to the other materials for the class. I then rewrite them, formally organizing the information, creating diagrams, using tons of colors and fonts, and trying to group related concepts as much as possible. When I do homework or other forms of practice, I write down thoughts I have as I do them, things my notes should probably include that they don't. When I reach the end of a chapter or section, I take both my good rewritten notes from each lecture and any notes from homework or other activities and combine them. If this is more than one section in before the test, I look at the finalized notes from the last section. Then I combine everything into one new set of finalized notes, making sure everything is incorporated somewhere, but big concepts get more room and smaller details get arrows and notes in the margins. When this is done for the last section or chapter before the test, I have a complete and final study guide. But honestly, I actually rarely look at it by the end. Just the process of writing, organizing, and constantly incorporating new concepts while consistently visiting old ones is enough. It even makes finals quite easy; I already made complete study guides from each previous test, so now I only have to do the work of combining them together. By looking at notes I made when the ideas were fresh, when I organized them as best as I could, using many visual elements for emphasis and understanding, the information comes right back in an instant. It does add up to a lot of writing, a lot of paper, a lot of pens, a lot of ink. But it means I spend almost no time reading, which for me, is 20x harder than writing. I read the textbook chapters just to see if there is anything it emphasizes that the other class materials don't, just to see if it covers something that other class materials don't, and only write down that stuff from it. It means all my study time is more physically active, so you will never see me trying to study through osmosis lol. Anyway, I think reading before, listening during, and recalling after is good for some people, but definitely not everyone. I could never get my first exposure to material by reading and ever think I would understand it. I couldn't just sit and listen to a lecture while doing nothing. And I couldn't ever write down everything I heard over the course of an hour. So the method I said above is what works for me instead. YMMV.
Incredible someone with ADHD can write such a long comment
I never take notes for this exact reason, I'm a very slow writer (and heavily dyslexic), so taking notes during a lecture just ment that I missed 80% while trying to write the 20% down. And afterwards it took me a while to try and deciver my own text, so much so that I just ended up reading the book anyway since it was much clearer than my own notes. Since then I've never taken notes and have done significantly better. I haven't really tried the recall method (I tended to just use the resources provided by the professor after the lecture), so that might be a good idea (although I'm not a student anymore, but one doesn't really ever stop studying, so I might try it in a course).
What drastically improved my capturing of the information of the lecture, was reading on the material beforehand. It pre-primed me, so I could take more away from the lecture. Without this priming, part of the lecture might be lost on me. In addition, the lecture also became a second run-through - a repetition, thus embedding the material more firmly in my mind.
This was so effective that for some subjects, I hardly had to study before the exam. If only I had found this method earlier...
I'm not going to argue with the studies, cause if they are done diligently my anecdotal evidence doesn't beat it in any way. But during my time in Uni I have developed I kind of technique that was kinda in between of taking notes and doing recalling. Our professors often made pauses here and there between paragraphs in their speech and while I didn't take notes directly, I used to summarize the main idea of their message of the particular part of speech they made.
I really think it helped me back then to understand the material better cause once I developed this technique for myself my results have improved dramatically which was very surprising to me
THANK you. I always feel like I'm being judged everywhere if I'm not scribbling down every little thing... Even though it does nothing for me. Even if I did take notes, I know I'll never go back and look. I barely look at my own internet bookmarks
Thx Mr. Keep!
im dyslexic and have been completed an Mchem and PhD. as an undergrad, I almost never took notes as I'm quite slow at writing and I found I would miss important stuff. it also varied from lecturer to lecturer as some had more detailed lecture slides, and others drew on the white board which makes taking notes easier
My professor sends us the powerpoint of all the presentation afterwards. That's also pretty good👍. We listen and most of us do not take notes
I think this very much depends on the type of lecture you're taking, on the materials provided and also on your learning style. For me it's almost impossible to pay attention to spoken word for a longer period of time but I have zero issue paying attention when reading or writing, and my visual memory is way better. So writing notes during the lecture helps me to actually remember what was going on, and then reviewing these notes helps me understand the topic at hand.
hii c: I started watching your videos recently and find them to be very insightful! However, I did have a few questions.
For context, I've been doing something very close to the "verbatim" notes method (I will write down basically everything the teacher is saying + what's on the slides, if there are any, along with extra comments/problems the teacher is discussing. I will also write exploration questions if they come up).
I have been under the impression for a long time that the purpose of a lecture is to teach new content (I expect to hear new phrases and concepts there). Is this not the case? What is the point of a lecture if I have already covered the content before class?
Or perhaps I should say that I would like clarification on the depth of which you should "preview" the content. What should I cover myself versus what should I leave to the teacher to explain?
Furthermore, I have a (perhaps irrational) fear that I will completely forget an important aspect of the lesson that I misidentified as unimportant that is not located on the lecture slides/other lecture material. I do not have the best memory--as I'm sure other people could say--and this instance has occurred before. Were it not for the notes I had taken during the lecture, I would have never retrieved that information (and in this case, it was on the test I later took). There is a chance, of course, that I would have recalled it better had I NOT been focused on writing it down, but I cannot be sure. How would I be able to not forget details if I don't take lecture notes (even if the notes are of just what the teacher is saying and not what is on the slides)? Would my memory naturally improve over time as I practice? Or perhaps more importantly: would I learn how to identify important information better over time?
On a related note, how would you suggest previewing content for a lecture if no resources are provided? For example, I am currently in a Physics class whose teacher does not provide lecture notes nor a textbook. The syllabus itself for each day is a one word summary of the topic we are covering. Is this an instance where it would be okay to take lecture notes?
tysm!!
Lots of good questions here. There are a lot of dimensions to note taking that interact in various ways - the lecturer and presentation style; the subject; the student and their note-taking abilities; available resources, etc. I'll try to give my best answers, but there is probably more than one reasonable position here.
I think the question is less, "is this new vs old information?" and more "how much of this will be new to me?" Or maybe even better: how much do I want to learn from this lecture? If everything is new, then it's going to be rather hard to get more than a basic understanding of the topic. I think the tendency is for undergraduate+ lecturers to move too quickly through the material, although that's certainly not always the case. With a short preview, you can spend effort focusing on the harder stuff, rather than be stuck on basic definitions and the like.
Another way to think about it is to ask, "when do you want to resolve confusion?" By previewing the material, you may develop open questions yourself, and there is a decent possibility that some of those open questions will be resolved during the lecture. With your lecture as your first exposure, you may very well develop questions after the lecture, which you may have to resolve on your own. Neither is bad - to some degree every student has to resolve their own questions. But I think the first route is probably better.
I think any amount of previewing is helpful - 5-10 minutes of looking over a chapter outline on the topic would do wonders. As a general rule of thumb, I probably wouldn't spend more than 30 minutes previewing the lecture. And, I agree, at some point it's like, "well, why do I need to go to lecture now?" But it depends on how difficult and unfamiliar the topic is, how detailed the lecture will be, how fast the lecturer will go, etc.
I hear your fear. : ) It is good to have checks on what you recall (other lecture notes, textbook, etc.). Perhaps you are in lectures that don't go very fast or you are a very fast writer or you already have relevant background information. But here's a question to consider: how would you know what you missed taking verbatim notes? Your goals are also relevant. If all you want to do is get good grades on tests (ethically), then find out as much as possible what will be on the test and focus on that material. My goal is for deep, long-term learning, which tests are one (imperfect) measure of. So I don’t sweat missing a few things on the test. A fail-safe you could use is to record the lecture for your own use, later on.
I don't think you would get any better at identifying important information in general fast enough for you to notice, all else being equal. Although it will come, as you understand lecture styles, expectations, etc. As you advance within a subject, you will probably get better at identifying which sorts of unfamiliar material is more important than others. But this crossover into other subjects will be weak.
For your physics lectures... yeah, not much you can do with that. Especially if it's just like "thermodynamics" or "electricity" - those topics are too large to know what to preview for a specific lecture. And no other resources, huh? I could see a good argument for taking lecture notes (but, again, verbatim lecture notes are not an effective way). Though I still would prefer the method I outlined in the video. Also, you can (and should) find other resources that cover whatever it is your lecturer is talking about. Especially in undergraduate physics. Check out www.susanrigetti.com/physics. Good luck!
1. It makes sense that free recall is more effective because you have to invest a lot more active cognitive effort and time to remember, structure and research the concepts.
2. However, in terms of cost-benefit-ratio, nothing beats taking reductive, processed notes (key words, arrows etc.) and going over them for 5 minutes again the next day, and 5 minutes again before the next class.
3. You can also combine the approaches. You take (smart) notes and upon your attempt to freely recall, you can reconfirm with your notes once you don’t remember (plus add Google etc. if needed).
When I was in college a bit over a decade ago, I tried a bunch of different ways to take notes before I finally just stopped. At the time, I thought I was just bad at taking notes and decided to cut my losses, but now I'm thinking maybe nobody else was having any success with it either and just didn't figure it out.
The one scenario where I kept taking notes (and which was tremendously useful for me) was verbatim copying of problems that some professors would work through in class (e.g., circuit analysis). I learned virtually nothing during those lectures, but going back and solving those problems myself before the test (which always had similar problems) was enormously beneficial. Of course, it would have been better if the professor had just made the problems available elsewhere, but that's a different scenario.
I’m in high school, but I take in-person freshman level college classes as well. I’ve always just watched the lecturer and occasionally typed something on my laptop. Though I only write something down if the lecturer puts intentional stress on an idea i.e. writing it on the chalkboard (for the elderly gentleman at my university), putting it on the PowerPoint, or repeating it. I consistently retain information more easily than my classmates and outperform them. However, West Alabama is by no means an Ivy League school, so I definitely wouldn’t call myself a genius by doing well in those classes.
I am enrolled in a Remote university and all our lectures are prerecorded. What I do is I listen to the lecture and pause to take notes. I write down what I find important and worth remembering. I like taking my own notes because I‘m already phrasing things in a way that is immediately understandable to me, I‘m breaking it down into smaller pieces and making it more digestible for me to reread.
That being said, I never liked taking notes in class because I felt like I couldn‘t focus entirely on what the teacher was saying and I would miss pieces of the information.
I stopped taking full notes when I was in 3rd year (my second year was fully online so I could pause parts when I wanted to). The information went in much easier when I had my attention focused on the lecturer, if there was something extremely important I would note it down quickly and only in a few words. But we had all the lecture slides to look at after the lecture, which is when I would write up the lecture later on in the day.
2:30 this is why I make sure to only write the note when the speaker is repeating content or if what the speaker is saying aligns perfectly with my note (i.e. I wait for moments of homogeneous speech, which are way more common that you might think).
And with seeing this video, I subscribe.
I love it.
I had
'The only defense of 'verbatim notes' I can think of, and the reason I tend to fall for it, is because you can do all the other approaches from those notes. If you screw up summary/encoding anything, you won't have the chance to fix it if you don't have the verbatim notes'
Happy to see this was addressed (7:50)
What are your thoughts on using stenography to take notes?
Also, I think we'd all appreciate a video on how to effectively take notes during class!
(E.g., perhaps you could do a vid comparing the findings of research on Cornell notes and double-entry journals?)
Hey there, you figured anything out about this yet? I'm also interested
@yuval1168 Yup! Stenography would only be useful for when you need to note-take extended prose that you don't have access to outside of the lecture but need to analyse for whatever reason. There's a pretty high barrier to getting good at it tho, so it depends if you have time for dedicated training.
As for cornell notes and double entry journals, either are fine for writing how, when, and why questions on the most important concepts and relations between that are presented in class (just so long as you space out cued recall after class to answer them). It's also advisable that you only really use these cued recall notes for lower-level lectures where familiarisation and memorisation are key. Otherwise, you'd get more use out of formulating "for-future-reference" or "need to look into" questions on emphasised points in class that either stumped or surprised you, will be useful to you, or that are critical to upcoming assessments.
Most classes provide PowerPoint slides. What I find fascinating is when I see people trying to rewrite the slides on their paper when they should be listening, noting things that are not on the slides, and noting what is being emphasized by the instructor. They miss all that and end up doing poorly on the exams. What is even stranger is when people take pictures of the slides which are already provided online for the students to download.
I actually like taking notes, but with an *:
Take them after a rememberable chunk of presentation/meeting during a dedicated break.
It's the equivalent of "Let's take a break to write the ideas down to not forget them. -Ok we have A, C -Don't foget about B! -Oh right! So we have A,B,C, everyone happy? *pause* Yeah!"
I realize now that it combines recall, encoding to summarize things and repetition.
I am a huge advocate of audio and video recording, which are superior to live lectures. I have had to play passages if biochemistry lectures at nearly half speed and loop several times through a paragraph because too much information was skimmed through too fast and never repeated. On the other hand, I often need to go through predictable, slow speaker lectures at 1.75 to up to 3.5 speed in order not to have my attention wander. I do use closed captioning to catch the random word, which occurs at speeds greater than 2.25 speed. Humans have evolved to comprehend audio very well over the past 3.5 million years, however, the phenomenon of decoding symbols into meaning is only a few thousand years old at best. I seem to be able to read only at 2.5 speed, but I can combine the audio and reading to get closer to 4x speed---without my attention wandering, and pulling out all, if any, novel ideas and points in the lecture.
My belief is that prerecorded lectures will free up the teacher's time for one on one tutoring with the students. And the student should be spending more time learning, rather than finding parking, walking to class, waiting for classes to begin, and waiting through a lecture for the next novel, relevant, or interesting point to be pushed out by the slow gutteral efforts of the lecturer.
Obviously, a more clear English speaker, proper microphone placement, who does not constantly pause (like President Obama, for example), will allow easier comprehension and can save the student who is trying to gain that knowledge, much time. Every speaker, every lecture, every listener (depending on their existing knowledge base and ears), every recording quality, and lecture rhythm, requires a different speed of playback (up to at least 3.5 speed) , a pause. The player should remove pauses and silence if desired, which is a trick to keep the speech for each sentence slower, while stripping out the non necessary pauses which can populate a good chunk of the time during a lecture.
I installed a speed control, a pause button a 10 second rewind/fast forward button on my wife, since she takes 10 minutes to tell me 45 seconds of information. But, for some reason, she hates me tapping on her right and left breasts and forehead while she is talking to me.
Hi! Thanks for the advice you give here! Do you have any suggestions or a video regarding notes when you are consuming content from a textbook instead of a lecture? My guess is that the same general idea applies. Not to write everything verbatim but instead summarize and practice free recall when you finish a chapter or a section.
Yep, that's what I would recommend and it's what I do when reading. One of the tricks is to be disciplined enough to do it before you read too much. Textbooks can be really dense. And it's easy to keep reading without thinking "hold up, do I actually remember/deeply understand what I read a half hour ago?"
It's also helpful if you feel lost. You can do a free recall session to see what is that you actually understand - however little it is, it informs you about where the gaps are so you can come back to your book with more direction.
@@benjaminkeep thank you, I will try this new approach. Thanks for providing such great content!
I always felt like and probably did miss at least half of the content the teacher was sharing with us.
Couldn't agree with this more. I was an absolute scribe in college, taking down notes almost verbatim sometimes because I was obsessed with having a copy of the courses forever. I suffered for it. This was a particularly awful strategy in STEM courses, where I would somehow be surprised to not be as attentive as my non-note-taking peers in answering questions thoughtfully and correctly. Didn't get bad grades, exactly, but came out of each course feeling like I missed out on a big part of the experience.
A school project. Went to a business with a dictaphone and recorded an hour interview about the company. Got home - it didn’t record 😮
So I wrote down everything either my friend we could remember and we were amazed how much we recalled. Only needing a short follow up revisit. 😮
This reminds me of my whole education: I was so scared missing any information, I transcribed and then I had to put in a lot of time to study.
Free recall is not possible, though. Often you can't prepare for the lecture and after the lecture you don't have time to take notes, as the next lecture is knocking on the door. Now, what do you do if you can't review the content of the lecture, if you don't take notes AND don't get slides or anything (which is rare but also sometimes the case)?
We all know the system of education needs to be reformed better sooner than later. Until then, we have to make do with what we have.
the only thing you are not considering is that without taking notes some people might lose their mind wondering about other stuff during the lecture 😂
That’s me
I taught Social Security benefit authorizing classes and I found that if I wrote the students notes for them and then I passed them out before each class things worked out best. They were free to add and underline what they found important and they could still concentrate on what they heard. It was the best of both worlds.
At a certain point In schooling, I stopped taking notes. Somewhere before my associates degree. I found that if I take notes I don’t always understand them, whereas if I just listen, I feel confident after the lecture. I would only write down algorithms or highly specific (non-intuitive) details that I knew I would forget lol