I don't think you should take notes during
lectures. The rest of this video explains why. I first became skeptical of the value of note-taking
during lectures when i was doing some research on different forms of note-taking. I came across
a lot of sentences like this one: "Students are wise to take notes, as those who take and review
lecture notes tend to have higher achievement than those who do not." What made me skeptical? Well,
the first part of the sentence is a causal claim, but the last part of the sentence is presenting
correlational evidence. Taking notes during lectures is generally perceived to be good
practice and if you want to be a good student you tend to do the things that people tell you
to do to be a good student. But to know whether taking notes during lectures actually
helps you, you have to test the idea. That's when i came across sentences like this one:
"In prior research, performance outcomes have not been consistently higher for long-hand note takers
than for those who just listened to the lecture" and, you know, did not take any notes. And that
started me going down this rabbit hole of research on note-taking. But to understand what I
found, we have to understand why note-taking might be helpful for learning in the first place.
Note-taking during a lecture is supposed to help you learn in two different ways. The first way is
called encoding. Physically writing down what you heard is supposed to help you remember what it
is you heard. Evidence for the effectiveness of encoding is a bit mixed, but it probably does help
you remember at least a little bit, just not as much as alternative methods. The second way that
taking notes during lectures is supposed to help you learn is by reviewing your notes later. So
that's what's called storage. You have a kind of source that you can go back to, to reread again.
The same kind of story here: rereading your notes is better than doing nothing, but it's probably
not as good as alternative methods. However, there is a competing theory about note-taking
during lectures and that has to do with attention. While you are writing down what the lecturer just
said, the lecturer is continuing to speak. During that time, your attention is split so you have to
pay attention to what you're writing and, ideally, under the encoding hypothesis, you are summarizing
and interpreting what the lecturer is saying. But at the same time you also have to
be listening for the new information that is being said. Generally speaking, splitting
your attention this way is a bad idea. It's a bad idea in almost any context and the consequence is
that learning suffers. Okay so that is an argument against the idea of taking notes during lectures,
but there's also an alternative approach. And the alternative approach is to leverage something that
we know is pretty effective at long-term learning and deepening your understanding and that is
called free recall. Free recall is not anything crazy or exciting. You just take a blank sheet of
paper out or anything that you can write on and you try to remember everything that you heard and
you try to, maybe organize a little bit of it as you recall. So, in a way, it's kind of like taking
notes after a lecture or after you read something. This kind of free recall is effective in lots
of different contexts and it's effective just on its own without doing anything else. But it's
particularly effective when you can see what was missed - when you can correct yourself in a way.
So what does the research really say about all of these claims? One, and this is something that
everyone agrees on, verbatim notes are very bad. If you think about it for a second verbatim
notes actually do not correspond with any of these theories. From the attention side, if you're
taking verbatim notes that means you have to write a ton and you're essentially transcribing
while the person is talking. So you have to be writing extremely fast for that to even get down
the notes - you've got to be missing something. So it's bad from the attention point of view. What
about encoding? Encoding is about interpreting and understanding and synthesizing what's being said
so if you're writing verbatim notes you're not doing that. So it doesn't really help you there.
And finally storage is kind of the same deal. If you are going back to reread your notes, you
certainly don't want to read a transcript of what was said. You want to read kind of a summary of
what was said or main points or even diagrams. So verbatim notes are bad with a possible exception
of taking notes on a laptop where there are some research findings that say maybe it's not so bad
on a laptop and probably this has to do with how fast your typing speed is. If your typing speed
is very fast, writing verbatim notes probably doesn't hurt you as much. There's a bunch of
other differences between taking notes on a laptop and taking notes by hand, but i'm not going
to get into those here. The second big finding, and this is going to come as no surprise to you
whatsoever, is that if you take notes on the things that are actually tested on, you do better
on those tests. Whether this supports the encoding hypothesis or not is a little unclear because when
you take notes on something that the teacher said, you thought it was important. And you paid
attention to that thing. So is it the case that you paid attention to it that was important?
Or was it the case that you wrote it down that was important? Well, probably a little bit of both,
but if you pay attention to the right stuff, you end up doing well and if you paid attention
to the wrong stuff - whether you wrote that down or not, you probably are not going to do as well.
The third thing, and this is the big one, is that taking notes during lectures doesn't really confer
any extra advantages beyond taking notes after lectures or doing what I called earlier a free
recall session after the lecture. In controlled research, taking notes during the lecture doesn't
even beat taking no notes and doing no review whatsoever. In this study, for example, the
no notes group did just as well as any of the groups using any of the other note-taking
methods on immediate tests. Now we know that in delayed tests free recall approaches
(or sometimes called self-testing approaches) beat re-reading by a lot and this increases
the longer the delay that you take. In all the studies I read, I did not see a single study
where taking notes during the lectures beat free recall on a delayed test. They either turn
out to be the same or free recall does better. Listen to this Youtuber explain his method: "You
need to preview the lecture. You need to look up words that you don't understand. You need to look
up general concepts that you don't understand. You really need to get to grips with that
before the lecture begins. You don't want to be struggling with things or googling words during
a lecture. You want to do that beforehand, so that you can focus on what the lecturer is saying.
That is my number one tip. So what I will do is, I will sit down after the lecture - no
notes, nothing open - and I'll get a nice a4 piece of card and I will recreate what I
learned from that lecture. And I will then add to those lecture notes or to that kind of active
recall card with the annotations and the slides that I have. He's got it exactly right. Prepare
for the lecture, take just minimal notes during the lecture, and then do free recall after
the lecture. Taking notes during lectures might have made sense in a different era if the
only source of information is coming from that teacher in that one moment and you have no other
way of accessing what that information might be. Maybe it does make some sense to take notes
even recognizing that while you are taking notes you're probably also missing some of the other
information from the lecture. But in today's age, a lot of lecture-based courses are on widely
accessible topics so a lot of lectures are recorded. You can go back to a recording, you
can look at a lecture transcript. In some cases, you obviously have your textbook or maybe
a friend's notes to compare with or lecture outline notes that someone else has created or
pretty much all of the internet to figure out what you may have missed in this particular
lecture. Keep in mind, that by taking notes during the lecture you're almost guaranteeing
that you are going to miss something. If you want to find out more about free recall i have a
video about that right here. See you next time.
