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Comment by lvoudour | Hacker News Reader

Agree 100%. I went to college before tablets and affordable laptops became ubiquitous, but the same problem applied to handwritten notes. After a few tries to keep notes and re-read them at my leisure I gave up, it was exhausting to take them and in the end I was missing too much.

The best solution is audio/video recording. I think every lecturer can record their lectures and publish them online later in the college's database or wherever. Cheap, easy and you don't have to worry about taking notes and missing anything

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I went to college before laptops as well. Taking notes has two purposes. First to remember what was said in class, extras that are not in the book, and it's a good indicator of the exam questions. Second is processing what is said. Research has shown that writing down what you hear makes you better understand and remember what is said, then when you type it on your laptop.

Even if you don't use the notes afterward, they are still useful. Video is a very useful method, but then the video has to be edited, or do you get three simultaneous streams, one of the professor, the board and the powerpoint? Videos like on Udemy are made for the medium. Class is not made for video, and I wonder how productive those videos are.

And when you go to class, do you really go home and see the whole class on video once again? That's way too time consuming. The notes are a good summary, much faster. Yes and it is taking effort, exactly what is needed. It puts your mind to work.

lvoudour didn't seem to be arguing against the research so much as agreeing with cjsuk that the lecture model of teaching is ineffective for some population regardless of note-taking medium. The research shows that, of people who learn effectively in the lecture-style learning model, more of them learn better from taking notes on paper. But, there is a significant - I would never claim majority - population that doesn't learn well in lecture-style learning. For that population, they could use electronic device, paper/pen, clay tablet, or direct imprints to the brain and it wouldn't matter: they don't learn well from being lectured to.

I avoided taking notes for much of college, except of key things I wanted to come back to on my own. So many people try to capture the whole content of a lecture in notes, but to me that’s more like transcribing than processing. What I found was if I listen like it’s a conversation, I can enjoy the lecture but then also have time to make connections and think about things. My notes did not reflect the lecture content itself, but instead were my own associations, reactione, and things I found interesting. But we are indeed not all alike.

I'm curious whether the research you mentioned had the people who actually grew up writing or typing. If the former, no wonder: I spent all my school years extensively taking notes, and nowadays taking a note on paper is a reflex I cannot get rid of, even despite typing way faster than writing. How feel those growing up with typing as the major way of taking notes I don't know, but am curious to learn more about any research on them.

Firsthand experience, I was way better at typing than writing, particularly after they forced cursive only on everyone and permanently ruined my ability to block-write (while cursive never delivered any of the supposed benefits and looks way worse).

The cognitive act of /making notes/ (actual notes) on paper delivered the majority of the benefit. I usually never actually looked at them again.

Similarly, when preparing printed sheets of notes on a topic later, the act of creating those notes (the closer to the exam the better) again forced the processing and short-term memory storage of the information and I //usually// didn't need them.

Ideally there would be a copy of any slides (including snapshots of the 'boards' every few min / just before erasure) and an audio transcript to aid in taking a lecture again, and maybe a historical Q and A session so that the average quality of questions about the material could accumulate higher/more beneficial for the students.

> First to remember what was said in class,

Why is your professor not writing down or recording this important information? At worst, 5 people per lecture should be transcribing and merging notes and sharing with everyone else, not 100 people per lecture.

> writing down what you hear makes you better understand

Yes, you should handwrite a copy of the book/notes/whatever, at an appropriate pace for you.

Did you read the article? Verbatim copying is exactly what is less effective than having to translate to your own words.

The best way to understand something is to have to explain it. Writing your own summarized notes is a light version of that.

Yeah I stopped taking notes after I realized I never looked at them. Even when studying for an exam, I'd always make new notes from scratch rather than rewrite or read old ones.

It doesn't work for all classes, but I found that listening closely to the lecture and maybe writing down some main points and then reviewing or studying later worked for me.

I find this especially true for my STEM classes, I can't for the life of me derive anything of value from lectures in math or anything math based unless we're talking about the broad overarching concept (like what an integral represents or what cache memory is for). If its the details of what some code does or how to do some operation on a matrix, forget it, I'm not going to glean anything more in that time listening than I would be able to figure out on my own with google in that same timespan. I find trying to follow examples to be simultaneously too slow to keep my attention and too fast when something was not apparently obvious to me leading to this effect where I'm either lost because I got what we were doing and my attention wandered so now I'm lost or my attention wanders trying to figure out the part that was not readily apparent.

One of the corollaries to this, if you're teaching, is that your time should be spent NOT on the details––not, for example, on the step-by-step algebra to solve some complicated algebra to solve some integral––but rather on the bigger concepts (e.g., the general strategy of how to solve that sort of integral). Give students the rough path and let them fill in the details, rather than just giving the turn-by-turn directions.

Right, its one of my biggest frustration with my university experience. Why am I paying you large sums of money for instruction that feels like it equates to a list of practice problems.

Very true and unfortunately all to frequently ignored.

It's been a long time since I've sat in classrooms on a regular basis but I do attend a lot of conference events. For the most part, I find presentations that get into a lot of very detailed step by steps and the like cause me to zone out. I'm far more interested in learning enough to cause me to check out something later and to understand some of the motivations, thinking, etc. It's also a reason I think that conference presentations are generally longer than is optimal.

Having said that, people do differ. And with a smaller and more interactive group, getting into the nuts and volts can make a lot of sense. But it should IMO be done sparingly in more of a lecture format.

All of my math classes derived things and went through some problems step by step, and then often later a problem would be given and you have 5 minutes to try to solve it then compare with what was done on the board. It worked well and I don't see why you'd do it differently.

Turn by turn is what "the book" and it's handful of reference examples before the actual test questions are supposed to be about.

The classroom time is for general theory and the QnA part for debugging errors in the understanding of students.

(In High School I found it way more useful to spend most of the in-class time doing homework... even if for another class.)

> One of the corollaries to this, if you're teaching, is that your time should be spent NOT on the details––not, for example, on the step-by-step algebra to solve some complicated algebra to solve some integral––but rather on the bigger concepts (e.g., the general strategy of how to solve that sort of integral). Give students the rough path and let them fill in the details, rather than just giving the turn-by-turn directions.

I'll argue the exact opposite of this in math class. I preferred lectures here the prof walked through the problem step by step and I could copy those steps down to my notes, and then apply those same steps for other problems.

The textbooks always skipped a lot of steps in the middle, making them hard to follow along. It ended up being the beginning, a bit in the middle, some magic, then the end.

Problem-based learning is a highly effective form of learning for some materials.

I'll have to dig for a citation, but I thought the act of writing the notes was educational (helps with retention) in and of itself.

I had one professor in college who told us that when she was in undergrad, she would take pages of notes every lecture and then literally throw them in the garbage on her way out of the lecture hall. She just discovered through trial and error that this was the most effective way for her to learn the material. And she did well enough to become a professor at a top-20 institution.

Conversely, I never took notes in her class (or any other), and that didn't stop me from doing well.

The moral of the story is, people are different and find what works for yourself. There are a lot of oddball strategies out there that some people swear by, and I bet it really works for them, but you don't need to try them yourself unless you're unsatisfied with the effectiveness of your current approach.

In the time you're crystallizing the knowledge in your head by writing down notes, you're missing information from the lecture. Note-taking is great when you're in front of a textbook.

I met a professor who acknowledged hammering the class with fast-paced talk to purposely frustrate note-takers.

His purpose: 'If you want to pass my exam, don't miss a class. Getting notes from others would let you "cheat"'

..asshole.

I can't edit my initial comment, but here's a link with citations that support my comment. In particular, the "Why do we take notes?" section... https://hilt.harvard.edu/files/hilt/files/notetaking_0.pdf

I rarely took notes for similar reasons (never looked at them again). But I still found note taking useful for memory recall. Having a slight photographic memory, by writing information/notes down on paper I could more easily visualize where and what I wrote and therefore more easily recall the information.

I've had a very strange experience: the act of taking notes helps, but having the notes isn't worth a damn.

I do benefit from note-taking, and I benefit more from pen-and-paper than typing. But looking back at my notes is rarely useful, and consistently worse than textbooks, lecture videos, or almost anything else. So I do the whole project just to boost my retention a little bit, and study from other sources.

I think this is key. There are studies that point to handwriting notes helping with the learning process, even if you don't end up using them later. I always found this to be true for myself as well — whether I'm in a lecture or doing some study on my own. I don't often go back to them unless I need to refresh on a single point. If I write them, I don't need them as much. If I don't write them, I'm usually having to study and read more and return to the references.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret...

It really depends on how the notes were taken. Jotting down thoughts when you study on your own is helpful. But it's extremely common for your brain to just copy words from the board / screen to the notebook without any cognitive involvement.

I think this was a big part in why pen-and-paper outperformed typing for me.

I'm slow at handwriting; to keep up with a lecture I basically have to use shorthand and restrict myself to the most useful observations. But typing, I can just be a pipe moving every word from powerpoint to a text file. That distracts me from the content of the lecture and doesn't do anything for retention.

Also before tablets and ubiquitous laptops, but after PowerPoint hit: whenever I had the opportunity to have slide printouts ahead of time, they were a surprisingly nice scribble sink (many slides per page, not a big stack). Those short bursts of details, questions or clarifications both from the talk and from thinking while listening that would be useless riddles without the context provided by the rough timeline of the slide deck. These won't magically turn lectures into the hours that make you pass a test (where did people ever get that expectation?), but unlike many other forms note-taking they do increase the value of the "on topic entertainment" provided by a lecture.

I really, really wish more professors had provided slides up front; many don't change them year to year anyway, and it would have helped immensely to prepare for the lecture and be more actively engaged. Syllabi are helpful, but even these days I insist on having at least a purpose if not a full blown agenda for meetings, otherwise what's the point?

As I wrote in another comment, a lot of my experience is with conferences. If I had presentations pre-loaded on my tablet, I absolutely think I'd get more out of many presentations by taking notes on PDFs rather than (usually) typing a bunch of notes and snapping pics of slides that I may or may not get access to at some point.

It's very simple: students who get the notes up front are less likely to come to class.

Before you tell me this is silly, it's a fact that some students need help to decide to come to class. Should we reduce the absolute goodness of the class to assist less-than-perfect students? We already do in so many ways. Sigh.

To clarify, I too was before the time of laptops and recording technology being available. MiniDiscs had just come on the scene then and the notes are worth nothing without what appears on the OHP and the contextual timing of them. Video recording was impossible.

Really every lecture should be recorded and links handed out to students.

A big killer is that the lecturer has been doing the same lecture for 20 odd years and is complacent or prefers to defer feedback to the end. Everyone is lost then. Same with meetings. Questions at the end? Context gone!

One option available today is writing on tablets. There are apps available that let you record and sync any notes you take to the recording. This lets you highlight a key point and then go back to the right spot in the recording. There have been various attempts to do this with special pens and paper but the tablet approach works pretty well.

It's not super-useful for me personally--I tend to default to a laptop for various reasons--but there have been times when I think note-taking like this would have been very useful.

> publish them online later

Note that you also need to have someone add captions to them for accessibility.

Most professors are experts at delegating the menial tasks to others :)

They are however terrible at remembering to delegate them from experience!

Sure, but that requires a budget

There was a note taking service I used. They hired students to type up lecture notes. Available the next day. On red paper so it could not be photocopied. It was money well spent during my undergraduate tenure.

> On red paper so it could not be photocopied.

Rediculous. Luckily today we have computers that can scan and color-correct. And social media so students can organize and cut out the middle-men

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