Taking Effective Notes for Lectures

When attending lectures, online or offline, it is important to recognise there's 3 phases of learning with lectures: before the lecture, during the lecture and after the lecture. Effective notetaking plays a role in all three roles. The University of British Columbia agrees with these tips.

Pre-Lecture Tips

Look Through Pre-Lecture Materials (Pre-Lecture)

Part of effective notetaking for lectures is making sure as much of the material is understood as early as possible. This is to ensure as much of the material is captured during the lecture as possible. Thus, if a course gives any material before lectures, it's important to review those and take notes on them beforehand.

It's also very helpful and useful to capture any potential questions that come to mind during this sneak peak of the lecture. To solidify understanding, attempt to find answers/solutions independantly. Then, during class, see if the pre-lecture questions get addressed; if not, reach out afterwards.

Decide on which Note-Taking Method to Use, Stick to it (During Lecture)

According to this research insight, students taking notes by short/longhand and those who prefer typing them up, actually had few significant differences in their ability to recall facts. However, those who write by hand are more adept at retaining concepts - that is, they perform better when asked conceptual questions.

Fact is, students typing notes often takem them down verbatim, this offers a shallower level of cognition around the topic than writing notes by hand that forces more synthesis to save time in writing. However, typing notes also has some benefits too, like being able to more easily read them due to the clean typography and review topics via searching. Thid can be amplified using software tools employing the ZettleKasten system

The research team wondered whether it wasn't the use of a laptop that was the problem, but the fact that the students were taking verbatim notes. So they followed up the study, but this time the students were cautioned against taking verbatim notes. Despite the warning, when the notes were analyzed, the students using laptops still took more verbatim notes and still couldn't answer conceptual concepts.

This and many other studies analyzed by the BBC found that each method had their pros and cons. So the key is to pick what advantages are most important and what disadvantages are the easiest to deal with.

I choose typing using the Zettelkasten Method, which gives me easily searchable and reviewable notes. Kind of like a personal wiki. This is because I'm a software engineer and creating the highly personalized tools that take advantage of this method are not too difficult for me. The main downsides are that typing does leave me taking verbatim notes. To avoid this it's really important to prepare before lectures. Also while in the lecture, do your best to first hear what is said, then come up with a condensed version of what was said. This will help to think more critically while the lecture is going. And of course, make up for the worse note taking phase by frequently reviewing and revising notes after the lecture.

Carry Out Final Preparations Before a Lecture

Get together all the tools needed before the lecture. This can mean bringing up the note taking app and preparing the document. But importantly, the environment where the notes will be taken, online or offline should be prepared:

Things to Do During Lecture

If there's enough time and the speaker has promised to record the lecture after class, it's probably fine to just watch the lecture twice. Once for familiarizing yourself with the concepts. Then re-watching for taking notes.

Pro-Tip: timestamp the time the note was created. This makes searching for it later easier, including zettelkasten software which can automate the task, but also to make crossreferencing lecture materials like slides easier later.

Focus on Emphasized Points

Resist the urge to take everything down. Look for cues instead - concentrate efforts on the details that get repeated, tonally emphasized or straight-up stated that is important. Make those details stand out, maybe with italics, links or bold type.

Avoid copying from pre lecture materials like slide. Instead - take down what the speaker says about the slides or written down elsewhere.

And finally, if the professor writes or annotates things during the lecture, avoid copying them. Instead focus on synthesizing the information and writing the condensed version.

Annotate Notes

Use Strategies to Keep Up with What is Said

Things to Do After Lectures

This is especially important when using typing methods like the Zettelkasten Method. Reinforce the learning by reviewing the notes after class. Here's how to more effectively remember what was learned.

Summarize Notes and Revise Them

Reconsult the posted materials/recordings and notes to cover anything missed while the topic is still fresh in mind that something was missed. Further strengthen the understanding by adding related terms and concepts from other sources.

When employing the Zettelkasten Method with software, make sure to frequently visit the topic's page or document made during the build phase.

Re-Organize Your Notes in the Style Tested In

Pro Tip: If the class allows cheat sheets during exams, it might be a good idea to get a head start now. Especially using notetaking software to generate cheat sheets

Clarify Any Questions - ASAP

Possibly most importantly, get questions you have before, during and after lectures asked and hopefully answered as early as possible.

Longer After the Lecture

Go back and revise the notes by checking grammar and spelling. Re-organize notes by the Zettelkasten Method by making each topic atomic and properly linked and backlinked to related topics. This will make review much more effective and searchable for future reference.

References