When you take good notes in class, you have a study tool that’s sure to help you get better grades. The way you take those notes can also determine your likelihood to sink or swim in a class. As it turns out, the old-fashioned method, using a pen and pad, is superior in terms of the learner retaining more information. So to shorten that up: paper notes are good and laptop or phone notes are not so good, and I’ll tell you why.
Benefits of Good Paper Notes
It seems a little obsolete to bring a notebook to class in this world of readily available technology that we live in. When we’re talking about being a successful student, however, paper the best resource available! One of the reasons for that is that laptops and phones tend to be too distracting. A student is far too tempted to play a game or take a gander at social media from any computer device; whereas with paper, you’re forced to stay on track.
On top of that, more mental processing takes place with the information when you’re taking hand-written notes. That’s one great reason to put your laptops away, but let’s break that down a bit.
When students take notes on devices such as laptops, they try to take down every word and detail, verbatim. When students hand-write their notes as opposed to typing them, they’re forced to find keywords and summarize the lecture. This means that they had to think about what was said, process it and write it down in a way that they understand. Doing that leads to the subject being better remembered by the writer. We write a lot slower than we can type, so we end up taking fewer notes but they’re more effectively learned.
Mental processing power booster aside, benefits of of hand-written notes go even further in helping you as a student. Pen and paper notes can keep you more alert and engaged during class. It helps to emphasize and organize specific information, and of course creates a more condensed version of the lecture to study.
Successful Note Taking Methods
There are different methods of taking notes for everyone. You might already have a way that works for you and that’s great. If you need some ideas on how to better your note taking, I’ve got some suggestions.
First of all, most instructors have no problem with you recording the audio of their lecture. This IS NOT me advising you to substitute this for taking notes, but merely a suggestion of a supplement to your notes that might come in handy later. Just ask your teacher or professor, they might be surprised by your initiative (bonus!).
A Few Methods to Try
The three major note taking methods are widely used and taught among college students. The first is a system of outlining all the material by identifying the main topic. Then make a list of details about it under the topic. This can be good if the lecture is staying with one topic and not jumping around a lot. If you are working on retaining a lot of information, you may want to try another method.
A different method to try is called mind-mapping, this is something you’ve probably seen before as it’s pretty common in high schools. The idea is to write the overall main topic in the middle of a page in a circle and branch ideas off of the middle circle. For example you might write “water cycle” in the middle and branch off of it with subtopics like “condensation”, “evaporation”, or “water tables”. This can be good for keeping up with a fast lecture but lots of details can fall through the cracks.
Finally, the last well-known method of note taking I have for you is called the Cornell system. This is where you start of the lecture by dividing your page into three sections with lines. Make it so there are extra small spaces on the sides or top and bottom. You take notes as you normally would in the middle, but the extra sections are there to get you a little more involved. After the lecture you are supposed to write keywords or questions in one of the smaller sections. In the other small section, you should write a summary of the whole lecture while it’s still fresh in your mind.
How Do You Know If You’re Doing It Right?
Good grades and teacher satisfaction is always a good method of measuring your success in a class. However, knowing if you’ve taken good notes or not can be difficult until the test comes. If you think you got all the important stuff written down then you’re finished, right? Wrong, you need those notes for the purpose of studying and ultimately passing the class with good grades. If your notes can’t help you with that, you might need to consider the five tips below from Dartmouth college’s website.
5 Essential Steps for Mastering Your Notes:
- Record the information
- Reduce the ideas to a key word or phrase in the left-hand margin
- Recite it without looking at it, and if you can’t, you don’t know it
- Review to get a complete picture of the ideas that were recited
- Reflect by speculating on the implications of the facts and concepts
P.S.
How you fuel your body also plays a huge part in how successful you and your brain are academically. Take a glace at our other articles about drinking enough water and the best brain food for college students.
