Is there still a point to taking notes these days? When I was in school, the purpose of note-taking was obvious. Lectures weren’t recorded. So if you didn’t take notes, important information would be unavailable to you when you needed to study.
However, that rationale for taking notes seems dubious when you consider the proliferation of audio recording tools, especially when combined with free AI transcription and summarization. Heck, you don’t even need to attend meetings anymore to know what was said!
In this video essay, I explain the science behind why notes still matter, and why technology may not always be our friend:
What is the best way to take notes?
The best way to take notes is any way in which you’re fully attending to the meaning of what is said.
But, beyond this, there’s surprisingly little conclusive research saying that any particular style of taking notes is more effective than the rest.
As part of my research for the video essay above, I dug into the literature on note-taking and learning outcomes. Broadly speaking, there’s evidence in favor of handwriting over typing notes out—evidence that becomes stronger, in my opinion, when you add the likelihood of digital distractions that occurs in most real-world situations with digital notes.
Taking notes at all greatly outperforms not taking notes. This includes some popular alternatives like taking photos of the slides.
But the basic truth seems to be that anything that causes you to really pay attention while you’re sitting in a lecture is going to improve your academic performance. This should be the priority for most students.
Note-Taking and Cognitive Load
One area I didn’t get a chance to dive into in the video essay was somewhat more “advanced” note-taking strategies, such as mind-maps, linking ideas together, analogies or rephrasing material as retrieval prompts.
I don’t know of a lot of systematic evidence on these sorts of techniques. But my understanding from theory, and from working with students practically, is that these sorts of approaches are likely beneficial when you find the lecture more or less easy to follow.
In other words, our old friend cognitive load [1] strikes again. If material is difficult to understand verbatim copying may be unavoidable, because even trying to paraphrase may be above your limit in the moment. I can certainly recall lectures where I didn’t understand a lot of the key terms, where paraphrasing felt like it was dangerously close to simply making stuff up!
On the other hand, if you feel like the lecture is, well, a little boring—you might benefit from taking further steps to engage your thinking by generating extra examples, coming up with analogies, visualizations and other strategies to try to engage with and better encode the material.
Notes for Learning or for Record-Keeping?
To me, the proliferation of technology-enhanced note-taking simply underscores the attention-boosting benefits of note-taking.
In a world where it is relatively easy to record a full transcript of a meeting, get AI to summarize it for you, and put it into whatever long-term record system you have, you are freed from some of the recording burden of note-taking. You don’t need to be a stenographer anymore, since failure to record verbatim is easy to fix from a backup.
Instead, in our current era, notes that force you to pay attention to the meaning of what is said and, to the extent you’re capable, allow you to think more deeply about it, should really be the priority.