Focusing on what is important means that you should resist the temptation to attempt to transcribe everything the professor says while you might be worried you will miss something important, attempting to produce a transcription of the lecture undermines the encoding purpose of note-taking because it requires minimal active engagement and critical thinking. Identifying what is most important helps facilitate learning by forcing students to organize and contextualize the material, while also enabling efficient review by generating a repository of ideas and information that is likely most relevant for exams and future recall. The key to taking notes that will simultaneously facilitate learning and be useful for review is identifying and recording the most important ideas, concepts, and facts from the lecture in relation to the overall course.

However, there are certain strategies students can follow, regardless of their particular note-taking method, to take notes that will help them both learn and remember the course material. There is ultimately no right or wrong method to take notes, and many students employ some combination of these methods, implicitly or explicitly. Each method has its own advantages and disadvantages and may work better for some students or in certain courses. One of the most popular is the Cornell Method, while other methods include traditional outlining, mapping, and the “CUES+” Method.

There are many different methods or formats for taking notes during lectures. The challenge is to take lecture notes that both facilitate learning and can serve as a useful resource for future review. This can be done by encouraging increased attention and focus during lecture, promoting active engagement with the course material, and/or structuring key concepts and facts. However, the process of taking notes can also facilitate encoding, or learning the course material in the first place.

The first function, external storage, is probably what most students have in mind when taking notes: to ensure they won’t forget essential information and create a repository they can consult when studying for exams or otherwise reviewing the course material in the future. Note-taking can serve two related purposes: external storage and encoding. Most students take notes during lectures, but why? What is the purpose of taking notes, and how can lecture notes help students learn better and improve their performance on graded assignments?

Note taking for college students