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The Cornell Note-Taking System

lsc.cornell.edu

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Re: The Cornell Note-Taking System

#31

Post by jldugger »

atoav wrote: post #30
nradov wrote: post #27

I question the value of taking notes at all. Of course different people learn in different ways, and I'm sure some students can benefit from taking notes. But for me the process of note taking is too distracting. Better to just focus on the lecturer and really listen . Then maybe write a few short notes afterwards for points not adequately covered in the assigned text.

I don’t see a contradiction there. As you said: differnt people learn in different ways. Just speaking for myself, but I can concentrate more if I take notes and not less (unless the thing is very visual in nature).

There is probably a value in taking notes after a lecture -- repetition and recall is a strong component in memory formation.

Re: The Cornell Note-Taking System

#32

Post by Bartweiss »

llamaz wrote: post #4

I have tried this, and tt's a good pedagogical method for learning-how-to-learn, but it's inconvenient in practice 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 in…

It seems like most things taught as note-taking methods are actually study methods. Obviously, the hope is to combine the two and automatically create a study tool, but I think that's usually a mistake.

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.

Re: The Cornell Note-Taking System

#33

Post by bonestamp2 »

nradov wrote: post #27

I question the value of taking notes at all. Of course different people learn in different ways, and I'm sure some students can benefit from taking notes. But for me the process of note taking is too distracting. Better to just focus on the lecturer and really listen . Then maybe write a few short notes afterwards for points not adequately covered in the assigned text.

I'm the same as you, although I believe most people are not like us. In fact, I find visual input so distracting that when I'm on a conference call and we're talking about something very complex, I actually close my eyes to listen/concentrate even better. This technique felt like magic when I first discovered it and it still does every time I use it now. Unfortunately, this method isn't socially acceptable in face to face interactions. :)

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.

Re: The Cornell Note-Taking System

#35

Post by ska »

jldugger wrote: post #31
atoav wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see a contradiction there. As you said: differnt people learn in different ways. Just speaking for myself, but I can concentrate more if I take notes and not less (unless the thing is very visual in nature).

There is probably a value in taking notes after a lecture -- repetition and recall is a strong component in memory formation.

In my experience (on both sides of the lectern) there is even more value in taking a few before the lecture.

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.

Re: The Cornell Note-Taking System

#36

Post by Bartweiss »

btrettel wrote: post #18
0kl wrote: post #7

If anyone else is interested in research on note taking, this is a survey of the research with citations: https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/note-taking 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…

> 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 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 sy…

I've heard both teachers and education researchers argue that once you understand an idea and represent it competently, repeated exposure is the only thing that matters for learning.

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.)

Re: The Cornell Note-Taking System

#37

Post by lowdose »

rckoepke wrote: post #22
artimaeis wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ML multi-speaker speech-to-text every conversation 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.

Trint[0] has a wonderful UI/UX for exactly this. I'm not sure if they're using the latest & greatest ML models, but even years ago I was pretty blown away. I still am. It's one of the most "right" products I've seen in this generation of web development. Someone realllllllly cared about the details of UX. Some of that only comes across when you actually use it - when you clean up the transcription immediately after t…

At $60 per user per month?

Re: The Cornell Note-Taking System

#38

Post by Multiplayer »

DailyHN wrote: post #28

GTD turned me on to notecards. I can't imagine going back. No matter how you want to organize the important stuff, the ephemeral nature of 3x5 notecards helps me get more ideas out of my head than ever before. "Your brain is for having ideas, not remembering them."

What do you do with the note cards? I love note cards, but now I just have stacks of them filling boxes.

Re: The Cornell Note-Taking System

#40

Post by dogweather »

atoav wrote: post #30
nradov wrote: post #27

I question the value of taking notes at all. Of course different people learn in different ways, and I'm sure some students can benefit from taking notes. But for me the process of note taking is too distracting. Better to just focus on the lecturer and really listen . Then maybe write a few short notes afterwards for points not adequately covered in the assigned text.

I don’t see a contradiction there. As you said: differnt people learn in different ways. Just speaking for myself, but I can concentrate more if I take notes and not less (unless the thing is very visual in nature).

> differnt people learn in different ways.

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-...

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