The Cornell Note-Taking System(lsc.cornell.edu) |
The Cornell Note-Taking System(lsc.cornell.edu) |
I think it's worth learning how to use Anki instead. The key challenge there is selecting the right level of coarseness, so that it doesn't take forever. Even if you don't end up reviewing your cards, the act of synthesising information helps you learn it. Down the line you're able to encode important information in finer detail.
Contrary to what you might think, this method is especially useful for really difficult concepts (e.g. in math and physics). Sometimes you sit through a lecture and have no idea what's going on until you start doing the exercises. In these cases you might have to use memory as a crutch, to try to memorize the main ideas (or useful facts) to create the scaffold which you fill in later.
Super useful. I feel like I don't really forget the majority of the vibes like I did for my astro undergrad. I remember GR a lot less than convex opt even though I spent many more hours of rigorous study and even though I revisited my GR material more. Revisiting my astro notes is still effective for those little details, but getting all the context into my working memory is much more exhausting.
That said, I think it's a good idea, but might not be for everyone. Kind of like how there are different apps like Notion, Trello, Quip, OneNote, etc., and while Notion works for a lot of people, some people benefit more from Trello's boards and cards.
Obviously, my plan doesn't work for everyone, or every class (this is a bad idea for fact-dump classes for me). But certainly after this I tended to look at everyone's list of "things you have to do to succeed in class" more as a menu than a proscription. Still do look at a lot of things that way; you can see it in our industry too, where you can find people telling you just have to use this type of type system or that type of database... yes, thank you for adding to my menu, but I'll examine that for myself, thanks.
Even worse, I have to start wrestling with the format as soon as anything unusual happens. If I miss something, or the professor makes a mistake, or someone asks an important question clarifying that bit 10 lines ago, or the structure of the information isn't linear, I want to be able to bounce around my notes connecting and fixing things in a way that I'll understand later.
Structured systems like Cornell notes work well enough in a slow, perfectly sequential lecture, but everything works there. And I imagine they might probably be good for memorizing completely synthetic content like the rules of an unfamiliar game, where there's not much thought to apply. But for practical notetaking, I think their best use is after the lecture, as a way to convert "get the content down" notes into a study-friendly format.
In school, thorough note-taking during lecture is a terrible idea. Only jot down your own questions to follow up on later; don't copy the material. Record the material and replay it later to review.
Note-talking "offline", at your own pace, from a book or a recording, is a great way to build your memory of the material.
In practice, the combination seems both difficult and ineffective. Most lectures are not perfectly clear and sequential - they have mistakes, backtracking, and questions. And much lecture content is not linear, especially in the sciences, so you get diagrams that don't naturally break into "read cue, reveal content". Trying to force the lecture into the note format distracts from comprehension, and produces notes that are good for retention but not for learning content you didn't understand. Even if you get past all that, there's a fundamental problem with trying to organize your study material before you know what's on the next slide, and trying to organize questions after writing down the answers.
Anki or any other after-the-fact study format lets you cut past all that. You can take notes fluidly, aiming at low-distraction completeness. And then you can rearrange the content for retention, not lecture-compatibility. Charts and non-linear content can be presented smoothly. Best of all, you can actually study with cues and content in a many-to-many relationship, linking dense info like a ternary diagram to many different prompts.
My system is constantly evolving as I discover what works for me and not, but it's in a pretty good place right now. Information gets processed in several distinct stages. I start with giving the learning material my undivided attention, whether it's a book, lecture, video, or museum. Shortly afterwards, I record my thoughts and observations in a journal as unstructured prose. This is usually about 2/3 recording things that were presented and 1/3 random connections that came to mind. The important thing is only to record what I actually understand -- if there was a lot of stuff that went over my head, it's a sign that I need to revisit the source material later after I have a better grasp of the fundamentals.
During a weekly review session, I read through all of the journal entries and index them by subject in a physical card file. Each card is headed with the subject, obviously, and the card body has a reference to the journal entry, the source material, and a 1-2 sentences summary about how the journal entry relates to the subject.
At the same time, I also make flash cards to add to my Leitner box (which serves the same purpose as Anki). My goal with these isn't to remember everything, but to keep enough of the subject fresh in my mind that I'll be able to think of the correct subject headings when I want to look information up in the future.
I use physical cards for these because I feel like they're a better serendipity engine than anything electronic I've tried. Whenever you're interacting with the system, you'll end up glancing at a bunch of arbitrary cards unrelated to your current task, and occasionally that'll be the trigger you need for a new idea.
One form of notes that I want to add to this is the long-term reminder. The idea comes from Chris Hadfield¹ and presumably others in the astronaut corps: once you've done the work figuring out how to reduce theory to practice, make a task-focused reference for it that gets filed away if you ever need to do that task again. The goal here is to directly record conclusions: if you are annotating a diagram of a machine, for example, indicator lights should be labelled with the corrective action to take in addition to the parameters that cause them to illuminate.
¹ Masterclass.com; Lesson #17
The important thing is the repetition/correction cycle.
I personally don't like the flow of Cornell's style, so I didn't use it as a student, but SRS software (Anki is still my preferred) didn't replace me needing to take notes and review those after class.
If anything, I would expect your Cornell notes to be a good basis for how you create some of your cards.
Interestingly, I basically started doing something extremely similar to this system (although, apparently backwards). My notes always included a line separating my main notes on the left from my key details and questions on the right, with the right column only about 3" wide. Ordinarily, I would leave 2 or 3 blank lines after each question so I could fill in the answer the interviewee provided and it reminded me to look for any blank space on my notepad before ending an interview (or, in the case of suspects, before asking more direct questions that may lead to suspect to end the interview before I got the chance to get answers to more minor questions). Ofter, my "summary" section would be extremely short and just describe larger timeline changes, like if a report spans multiple days or locations, I would mark the end of one incident in the bottom few lines of the page and jump to a new page to take notes about the next incident.
I'm very curious if this methodology is used by a lot of others as well (especially in law enforcement), or if I just happened to find one with remarkable similarity to Cornell's.
I remember having these notes ingrained into my brain in middle school; at Ithaca, I didn't know a single person who actively used Cornell notes for note taking. That said, actively engaging and re-engaging with content will help you build better internal bodies of knowledge on the subject, so you'll retain the content long after prelims and finals.
I also went to Cornell and never saw it used or mentioned once.
Unfortunately it doesn’t look like there’s been as much research on specific methodologies (e.g. Cornell method), but it may also be the case that the methodology doesn’t matter at all, only that the strategies are employed.
I’m surprised it doesn’t mention the encoding and external storage paradigm, but https://www.cc-seas.columbia.edu/node/31875 has some additional context for anyone that wants some vocabulary and a very short “methods” and “strategies” document.
I recall that in the book Your Memory by Ken Higbee he said that various study/notetaking methods don't differ much and just combine strategies that are known to work. So he picked a popular system to recommend to readers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ3R
You can immediately see similarities between SQ3R and Cornell Notes.
If people who are using a specific technique get better results, it's probably just survivorship bias, because everything in education is survivorship bias. Even if people who adopt the technique all do well, it's probably just selection bias on the sort of people who seek out new study techniques. And if you teach it to students and they improve, it's probably still the Hawthorne effect, with novelty and optimism meaning it gets used more consistently at first.
There are a few pretty miraculous results, but they're mostly on memorizing lots of completely arbitrary info (e.g. memory palaces). Outside of that, it seems like picking anything easy to use and being consistent is the winning approach.
(I'd allow a special exception for things like Anki: if one tool supports data relationships another doesn't, it can obviously be better for learning that sort of content.)
"Your brain is for having ideas, not remembering them."
The act of filing new notes will force you to at least glance at your old ones, which can generate serendipitous mental connections. You'll also see when you have multiple cards covering the same topic, which helps to link disparate facts about the same thing together in your head.
On a more general note, I've noticed throughout my undergrad experience that whenever some lecturer/Professor/TA comes up and says they read a study about "evidence-based learning" and that this method will help us learn 10x better, they're full of shit. I want nothing more than to take notes however I want, to a lecture.
But, I know my wife does not learn well this way. I also help my kids with their homework every night and I've tried this method with them when they don't understand something -- it doesn't work well for them either. Everybody does learn differently and I wish I learned how I learn best while I was actually in College; I probably could have saved myself a lot of time by not taking notes at all.
I hope there is now, but at least when I transitioned from high school to college, there weren't any simple resources to prepare me for the workstyle adjustments that I should have made. So, I appreciate this article at least in the sense that it is trying to offer students a framework for success. That said, I wish it offered some alternative suggestions for those who can't write notes and "listen" at the same time.
There's something intuitive about that, but I think the data show the opposite. We all learn the same way.
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/learning-...
Writing by hand is slow for me, though, so I found myself paying attention more to the note-taking than the lecture.
Taking notes via laptop was a game changer for me. I could take voluminous notes and keep up with the lecturer. It was wonderful! Not all upside, of course, as laptops come with their own problems, the biggest probably being ease of distraction, but I think it was a net benefit for me.
* important points
* questions to ask, either during the meeting or afterwards. If it gets answered during the meeting, I put the answer under 'important points' and cross out the question.
* things for you to do after the meeting
* any commitments others take on which you want to keep track of
I do this by entering them on different areas of the page, others use different symbols at the beggining of the line (?, !, *, @).
As soon as I finish the meeting, I share the notes with everybody.
If you don't have a dedicated assistant, set up a rotation with your team to scribe for each other.
Only jot down a few brief personal notes for yourself.
Is there a good description/explanation of this?
Radical transparency by giving everybody access to this interface.
Awesome bullshit filter.
You had me here. Companies that do this as a matter of course on their key production lines usually become very, very productive.
Its not to catch worker ethics lapses; its to give the team the ability to understand the causes of their exhaustion, and optimise.
Anyway, done properly, meeting notes and general distribution can give individual members of a group a lot more agency over their participation in that group.
I honestly love this idea. Any suggestions on what FOSS tooling to use for said speech-to-text that's reasonably accurate? Or is training the ML the "heavy lift" of this setup?
Neat idea, do you know of any software that's capable of taking an audio file and producing multi-user text from it? Seems like it would be useful in a wide variety of situations.
https://bulletjournal.com/pages/learn
As a meeting secretary, you can use a similar process but you have to be mindful and listen actively since you're tracking info for more than you.
Put them in an inbox immediately after writing on the notecard.
At a predetermined time, manage the inbox.
Some of my notecards get stored into folders created for current projects. These folders can be digitized at a later date for archiving and searching. Though, most notecards don't make it that far.
Some notecards represent tasks. Those get recycled as soon as they are completed.
Many notecards head straight to the recycling bin. You'd be surprised how often something seems like a good idea before you write it down.
Most of my process follows the "Getting Things Done"(GTD) framework by David Allen. I highly recommend it.
With typical lecture structure, you get a little review tying in the last subject(s), a little bookkeeping/admin (next week we will...) and then a new topic or topics, followed by some synthesis.
If you've had a quick look at the new topic already, you'll know where your understanding is good and where it isn't. You can pay attention to the right bits, and ask questions if needed.
Review afterward is very useful, but probably more topic-by-topic not lecture-by-lecture. After the lecture you add that material to your ongoing review.
As you point out, asking questions is useful, and trying to answer them yourself first is even more so. One student classification researchers have identified is rule vs example learners. Rule based learners seek out rules to learn something, while example learners typically try to memorize examples. Rule based learners tend to do better in scholarly tasks / exams. However, example based learners can be taught to be more like rule based learners with a few hacks: prompt them to compare different examples, instead of reviewing one example at a time, inserting questions into the marginalia / chapter headers, etc.
In my experience, a lot of learning is a back and forth between rote memorization (like vocabulary) and building concepts/associations. Rote memorization can also be a lookup table to focus on higher-level concepts--like memorizing your times tables. Spaced repetition (like Anki) focuses on rote memorization. Lectures and note taking, like this, are a mix focusing on concept building while homework is both generally focusing more on rote memorization.
But there is some difference person-to-person. For example, many people I know work through things by talking out loud. I struggle with this and feel like I have to ruminate on my own to flesh out ideas.
The actual conclusion, straight from the source you linked:
"But psychological research has not found that people learn differently, at least not in the ways learning-styles proponents claim."
Something I try to do is keep my physical notecard files small. Besides the inbox file, urgent and important notecards are the only ones I keep in a physical file.
It's surprising how fast you can go through a thousand notecards. So effective filing is a must. And for me, that means maintaining digital archives. Something that, on its own, is a whole topic for discussion. Once again, I recommend GTD by David Allen if you'd like to dive deeper and avoid reinventing the wheel.
¹ https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.216804/page/n7
David Allen, in GTD, recommends an alphabetized system. Something that I don't do because all of my reference material is digitized and easily searchable.
Search-ability is the primary reason I avoid keeping a large physical file system.
I take inspiration from multiple books written about productivity and organization. Other books that have been highly influential in my systems are:
- Principles (Dalio)
- The ONE Thing (Keller)
- Organize Tomorrow Today (Selk, Bartow)
- Productivity Planner (more of a journal than a book)
Some of that only comes across when you actually use it - when you clean up the transcription immediately after the meeting or the next day. Clicking a mistake word to edit it snaps the video and audio to that point, so its super intuitive to "scrub" through the video just by clicking around the text transcription. Very fast, very natural, very low effort.
I can only imagine how much it will be improved if it used google's newest multi-speaker transcription models. It always had some trouble whenever people started talking at the same time.
That doesn't mean I was willing to pay $60/mo/pp though, and ended up not.
However, I still think it's the best product in its category right now and given the disappointing state of product design these days, I don't expect anyone to catch up to its interface. I'd love if an open-source group did though.
On top of this you can add 5000 names for company specific entity recognition for product, people, brand names etc.
120 different languages are supported.
If such a speech-to-text, multi conversation system existed then the field of court reporting/closed captioning would have a real shake up.
This has the odd effect that I'm more successful at finding things in my paper system than I ever was with an electronic one, though it's probably of little use to anyone else. I also find that flipping through the notecards to file or look up something serves as a pretty good idea-generation engine.