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Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

It would be nice to see a comparison against students who don't take notes. I never took notes in any of my classes, and my father (a senior Chemistry professor) is a firm believer in this approach -- while he doesn't prohibit students from taking notes, he has provided lecture notes for two decades and encourages his students to pay attention instead of transcribing.

Of course, there's always the inherent problem of observational studies: Is the note-taking style affecting student performance, or does student aptitude determine note-taking style? The students who already have a reasonable grasp of course material are likely to be manage with the limited bandwidth of handwritten notes, whereas students who don't understand anything and are consequentially unable to identify which parts are important may be predisposed to prefer a higher-bandwidth note-taking system.

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Why does one want to take notes in a university lecture? Usually it is because you are expecting to go to the lecture and have the professor pour knowledge into your head. Only, that's impossible because the material is difficult and large. So you go to the lecture and record what the professor is saying and study it later.

What if you did the opposite? What if you found out what the professor was going to lecture on and studied it (using text books) before the lecture? That way you could spend the lecture time listening to the professor and devising questions for the things you don't understand.

Yeah... I only figured that out in my last year ;-) We really should teach students how to study.

Hand writing increases engagement. I didn't record verbatim, but drafted my version of the material, as if writing a textbook.

Handwriting, being free-form, is far superior to typing for this, as it's easy and quick to insert things, add arrows to relate ideas, circles for grouping, emphasis in several different ways etc.

I agree the quality of this personal textbook does vary with your preparation, background knowledge, density of the material is, and your aptitude for this particular material.

You can do this sort of thing with mind mapping software

I've tried dozens of different software suites to try and replicate hand written notes, and nothing else comes even close to handwriting (for me, at least)

I've experimented with lots of digital note-taking styles: mindmaps from open source to paid, notebooks like evernote, bookmarking systems, PPT flashcards...but none can really replace writing notes with hand. Its a lot faster, no accidental clicks, and drawing and annotating specific things are a non-brainer. When I got a highly sensitve tablet to actually write things in it, it still felt clumsy. I have to take pictures then import them into my notebook app, I have to switch pen colours and nib width, and then there's the ironic trouble of not being able to find a specific information I want, unless i do sophisticated tagging but that's also too much effort. And oh boy the panic that came with the battery running out halfway through a lecture.

Back to pen and paper for me, and loads of post-its for bookmarks.

When I was in school, I almost never actually consulted my notes, and they were often practically illegible, but I still found that the process of taking notes helped me retain more information. It also had the side benefit of making it harder to doze off.

Likewise. I can't read my own handwriting but the process helped a lot.

Exactly this, on all points! And my notes act as a reference sometimes when the professor provides a piece of info I couldn't find in the others sources.

This is what the Hagakure (book of the Samurai) says about this [1]:

"In Yui Shosetsu’s military instructions, “The Way of the Three Ultimates,” there is a passage on the character of karma. He received an oral teaching of about eighteen chapters concerning the Greater Bravery and the Lesser Bravery. He neither wrote them down nor committed them to memory but rather forgot them completely. Then, in facing real situations, he acted on impulse and the things that he had learned became wisdom of his own. This is the character of karma."

Personally, I'm all for taking digital notes as they are searchable and can be backed up. I think either way, the process of taking notes is more important than the tools.

[1] https://github.com/hollanddd/hagakure/blob/master/chapter-10...

That is really a description of Zen and spontaneous learning. Personally I've never experienced this phenomena...

I like the idea, but I'm not sure I would want to rely on it, say, in an exam.

So what you are saying is that in your personal opinion you think the carefully designed and executed study reported here is wrong, because you disagree with it. Because the study specifically says that when taking notes, handwriting outperforms using a computer.

So tell me, why is the study wrong?

I don't necessarily agree with the findings, but you may have missed something. The article talks about typing vs writing. This person talked about listening instead, and that does work for some people.

Let me give you an example where the study can be wrong. My son is an Aspergers. He is classified as gifted or near gifted (it's a fine line). However, he struggles to write. So, in his case, he has 2 options: (1) just listen [he has a great memory and this has proven to work well], or (2) type.

I take these types of advice with a grain of salt. Rather than the what, I focus on the why.

My own experiences reflect those of many commenters here: I wrote notes and either couldn't read them or didn't go back to them. I most probably should have listened rather than scribe myself.

you are saying that a large collection of self-reported anecdotes more correctly describes a population than a study; we say "you're wrong," and there is plenty of statistical evidence that proves you are wrong, but of course you don't believe in statistical evidence, instead you'll tell me that you can think of ways you could be right and you can remember some times when you were right and some times when your family members were right.

I'm exaggerating of course, but I think that sums up the discussion here?

I wouldn't say the study is wrong, but I think there are two different aspects here: tools used to take notes vs. amount/ kind of notes taken. From the article:

> Laptop users instead took notes by rote, taking down what they heard almost word for word.

That does sound like a bad idea. However, a student could also use a laptop to take more abstract notes (as I assume the pencil users did). On the other hand, a pencil user might be able to write shorthand, thus taking almost verbatim notes (which would probably be less useful).

So, instead of ditching your laptop, think about how to use it.

I understand where instructors are coming from when they encourage just paying attention and not taking notes. That's because students often just copy down exactly what is being written on the blackboard verbatim without giving it much thought.

What enhances both information retention and understanding for myself personally is "active note-taking" - that is, not only writing down what the instructor is saying, but writing down my own thoughts along with it.

When I joined a very demanding part of the French education system [1], my grades started to drown. I had basically never had to study to be top of my class in High School, and suddenly I was in the bottom quarter. I resolved to work much harder, and my grades went back up, but by the half of the first year I was still not where I wanted to be and I started feeling depressed and wondering what I was doing there.

At the time, there was one national exam you could take at the end of first year to join a mid-tier "École" (engineering school) directly. I knew I was good enough that I would almost certainly pass, and I decided to take it. There were two days of written tests. The first one went well, but as I was walking up to the 2nd day of tests I was mugged in the street. I ended up spending that day in a hospital, so I couldn't take the test. Now I had no other choice but to stay in CPGE for one more year.

After that episode I decided I couldn't continue like before, something had to change.

One of the main things I changed was that I stopped transcribing classes. That was considered heresy by teachers, who told me I would certainly fail. You have to understand that math teachers (not all of them, but mine did) wrote their lecture on a black board, and you were supposed to transcribe all of it. You would end up with binders full of math demonstrations that you were supposed to learn by heart.

The problem is, I am completely unable to focus on two things at once, and writing takes focus. So while I was copying what was written on that black board, I was not understanding it. Just the math classes took something like 16 or 18 hours per week, and I was wasting all that time. So instead, I bought books. I would read them in advance so when I went to class I knew what the teacher would talk about, and I would understand the details and the demonstrations.

The result? My grades went back up. At the competitive exams at the end of the year, I got the best rankings of my class, better than those of students who had taken the 2nd year twice.

So of course, this is anecdote, but I just wanted to say that what you wrote resonates with me 100 %.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classe_pr%C3%A9paratoire_aux_g...

That's a great approach if you have a good memory. If you don't, not so much.

When I was younger, I used to never take notes and remembered almost everything. I never had a photographic memory, but certainly remembered enough to understand and do very well on tests.

As I got older, doing that became harder and harder, so I started relying on notes. My note-taking skills went from pretty poor to really good, and now I feel crippled if I can't take notes. This is especially true when the course-load is high, and you're expected to remember a ton of material per course. Relying exclusively on your memory for something like that is only effective for a certain fortunate segment of the population.

Notes are also great for review years or even decades later, when the things you may have remembered at the time are long forgotten. They're also great for sharing with friends and publishing, like Sacha Chua[1][2] does with her notes.

[1] - http://sachachua.com/blog/2013/05/how-to-learn-emacs-a-hand-...

[2] - http://sachachua.com/blog/sketched-books/

Definitely agree here. After being told to take notes for years, I spent a lot of time trying to make the notes fit. Even still be busy jotting down older notes 10 seconds after the lecturer had moved on. Those 10 seconds of having two trains of thought - what was being written down, and what the lecturer had moved on to - are terrible. And it happens at least once or twice in a lecture, often more depending on how quickly the lecturer is moving.

After throwing away the idea of taking notes and concentrating on understanding exactly what was being said 100% of time, everything got easier and if I remember right, my marks even improved. And the best part: less stress.

I very much recommend never taking notes. If you concentrate and understand exactly what is going on, you don't need notes. You can look up whatever little facts you may need later in the textbook or online. If you understand the concepts, there really are no notes that need to be taken.

I have a strategy of only writing key words or phrases and noting things that are emphasized. For example, my notes on the previous sentence would simply be "notes-key words".

Yeah I've tried that too - but you're now spending half your time understanding, and half your time summarizing. The idea of summarizing as a method of learning is also pretty heavily pushed and does seem to work, but for my personally, understanding is more important than summarizing.

I split understanding and summarizing personally, because understanding is more about being able to replicate the methods used, while summarizing is about condensing the lesson into a key point that could aid understanding. I personally find that the summarizing technique does not aid understanding any more than simply following along with the logic and concentrating fully on why it's happening.

Obviously some people may require that extra summarized step to allow them to recall the lesson, but I've been able to do without it by concentrating on the flow and linking it to other knowledge that I've already internalized. That way you don't need those key points jotted down for later - you just need to reason about where you're trying to go and use the understanding to plot a course. Then look up the steps where you know you're unclear on the details in a textbook or web search.

I'm also a not-taker (as opposed to a note-taker) and my entire school career consists of binder paper covered with doodles while I listen, with half-hearted notes taken when the teacher required it for some reason. This got me into some trouble once or twice when the teacher lectured a fact that was nowhere to be found in the textbook, but for the most part it was just one of multiple things that made me a poor fit for academia.

I do make use of mind-mapping now, though. It's handy for dissecting a big linear text into branches and partitions and not overlooking parts when I try to review.

I remember our algebra professor adopting aprroach that seems like a compromise between those two.

He provided us with lecture notes, usually containing all the definitions, theorems, lemmas, and proofs and then encouraged us to take notes on the margins of the lecture-notes.

They key point is to be engaged and your father had the right idea. Someone who writes everything down, or writes nothing down, probably misses out.

My first year I took no notes, and attended lectures intermittently. And got the middling results you'd expect.

The next year I looked in the syllabus and tried to do the assigned reading (to be read after the lecture) before the lecture. Often it was confusing, but some of it I'd understand. But that way the lectures were more useful since I could tell when the prof was explaining something I didn't understand, and I had the context for it.

Of course the ideal lecture would be "well you all have read the material; here's the stuff that's hard and/or non-obvious about it." But since what's hard varies from person to person, it's not really possible for a prof to do this except in a small seminar.

And of course note I said "I tried to do the assigned reading" ahead of time. In retrospect I wish I'd done it 100% of the time, but really humans are humans and the amount I did manage it paid off.

For logic based classes the effectiveness of note taking is greatly diminished because the majority of learning happens at home while grinding problems.

However in memorization based classes, skipping notes is entirely suboptimal. When you're expected to keep esoteric information in your head for months at a time, you need every edge you can get. And in my experience, the most powerful edge is knowing exactly what was said in class.

At the end of the day it comes down to picking the right tool for the job. Back in college, I took handwritten notes for my technical courses so I could draw in figures. For courses like Biology, I took transcript-style notes on my laptop, and they were extremely effective.

I suspect the confounding factor in this study is that students who bring laptops are far more distracted on average than note takers, not that typed notes in and of themselves produce worse outcomes than hand written notes. Unfortunately, people see headlines like this and immediately jump to conclusions, which is a shame. Computers are powerful tools if used properly.

My problem I that I can believe any bullshit that is in the blackboard when I don't take notes. But when I'm copying them I have to think about the details, like "From where does this 2 came?"

You could do an encouragement design to try and get at a causal effect here. Randomly assign some classes to be encouraged to take notes, not take notes, or do nothing. It'd take a lot more work to get your statistical power, but if you see that over a large aggregate the kids who don't take notes tend to perform better over the long run (you'd definitely want to look at performance in subsequent classes that aren't actively being experimentally manipulated when measuring outcomes), that'd certainly be indicative.

An encouragement design might be more appropriate to the question, anyway. The policy decision from an institution's perspective isn't really, "Should students take notes or not?" It's, "Should we be advising students to take notes or not?"

I'm amazed how much stuff I've learned from school that I've totally forgotten. Now if I want to learn something I write a note and later put it into the flashcard system anki. Anything I don't take notes on I basically expect to forget within a few months if not sooner.

Unfortunately many teachers don't post notes, they expect you to transcribe what they're saying. So inevitably, no one is actually listening, students just wind up comparing and trading notes, trying to 'study' from there, and seeing where it lines up with the textbook.

I agree, the classes where I've learnt the most are the ones where notes are posted ahead of time, you can look over them, actually listen during class, and gain an understanding of the subject, not just memorize bits and pieces to then transcribe on the exam.

The bigger issue is that lectures themselves have been consistently shown for decades to not be effective for learning, so this is just fiddling around the edges.

I've found the main reason that lecturers don't hand out the notes in advance is that they fear the students only attend for the handout (which is a pretty damning critique of the lecture if true) and the lecturers are in turn evaluated via student attendance.

Add they try "flipping" where you watch video lectures at home and actively solve problems in classes. Small, active classes arent cost effective for universities.

Taking notes is usually considered a tool for paying attention.

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