How to Take Effective Learning Notes
Effective note-taking at the right point in the learning process can be a powerful, catalyzing force behind your learning.
Generally speaking, there are four phases to the learning process:
Goal-Setting: Figuring out what you want to learn and why you want to learn it
Discovery: Becoming aware of new concepts, ideas, and skills related to what you’re learning
Engagement: Engaging with those concepts, ideas, and skills through studying, practicing, and getting feedback
Performance: Using that learning in a real-life “performance” like test-taking or a real-life scenario (and getting additional feedback)
Different strategies and techniques are needed to advance from one phase to the next.
Unfortunately, many learners use the wrong strategies for the phase they are currently in. One example of this is note-taking. Note-taking is an excellent strategy for stage two (Discovery) but a mostly ineffective strategy for succeeding in stages three and four. When used at the right time, note-taking can be a powerful catalyst for advancing in the later stages of the learning process.
This article will break down everything you need to know about effective note-taking, including:
How note-taking contributes to the learning process
Different styles of effective note-taking
How to organize learning notes
How to review and update your learning notes
Mental Representations and Note-Taking
To move efficiently through each phase of the learning process, the brain needs to create cognitive structures called mental representations.
Think of a mental representation as the “structure” of knowledge in your brain that helps you understand, remember, and apply what you’ve learned.
These mental structures start to form as soon as you become aware of new ideas, concepts, and terms (the Discovery phase), and effective note-taking can help you do this effectively.
During the Discovery phase, effective note-taking helps you:
Create your own “reference guide” that you can use when studying and practicing later on
Create early “mental drafts” of your mental representations
Direct your attention and focus in the discovery phase
As discussed earlier, note-taking isn’t a learning strategy you would use in the Engagement phase (studying and practicing), but it is foundational to preparing for it.
Styles of Note-Taking
Depending on what you’re learning, there are a variety of note-taking styles you can use:
Sentence
Outline
Cornell Notes
Charting
Mind Mapping
Sentence Note-Taking
Sentence note-taking is like creating an inventory of what you need to study later.
To do sentence note-taking, capture a long list of individual sentences for the main ideas, concepts, and pieces of information you need to learn. Since you’ll return to your sentence notes later when studying, even as few as 2-3 words per “sentence” (or line) can suffice. When using sentence note-taking, don’t concern yourself with capturing perfect or complete sentences; instead, focus on using whatever language makes the most sense to you.
One benefit of sentence note-taking is how simple and easy it is to do.
When you follow along with a lecture or presentation, sentence note-taking makes it easy to freely capture ideas without worrying about structure, ordering, or how your notes are organized. This free-flowing structure makes sentence note-taking the preferred method for some students.
Sentence note-taking is great for capturing concise “bits” of information you can study through forced retrieval techniques.
Outline Note-Taking
Outline note-taking is similar to sentence note-taking but also organizes your notes with headings, bulleted or numbered lists, and callouts, all of which provide more structure. Here’s how:
You can use different heading sizes to help organize information into groups of like information or closely-related concepts
You can use bulleted lists for capturing the parts of a whole that don’t have any particular order
You can use numbered lists to capture the ordered steps for a process or task
You can also use callouts like bold, italics, or shapes to draw your attention to key ideas
One benefit of outline note-taking is it creates an early version of your mental representation in a way that sentence note-taking doesn’t.
Headings, lists, and callouts can help you associate ideas and concepts from the start, making them easier to study and review later on. Outline notes can also be easily converted into study materials using forced retrieval.
Cornell Notes
Cornell Notes center your focus around an essential question and organize your notes into study materials from the start.
The Cornell Notes method has a variety of unique features that make them highly effective:
All Cornell Notes begin by posing a single essential question which helps focus your attention for the note-taking session. Instead of capturing a long list of ideas on the page, the essential question serves as a filter to help you determine whether or not something is worth writing down.
Cornell Notes then divide the page into two columns: one for questions, main ideas, and terms, and another for answers, notes, and definitions. This creates instant study materials that you can use in future study sessions using different methods of forced retrieval.
At the bottom of the page, all Cornell Notes close with a summary of the notes. This summary should answer the essential question at the top and serve as a high-level “abstract” of the note contents.
Cornell Notes are great for students taking notes in live or recorded lectures.
Click here to view and download the free LearnChangeDo Cornell Notes Template for Notion.
Charting
Charting notes are great for organizing new information into categories or groups.
To take charting notes, create a table or chart that combines any categories, types, or characteristics of the information you’re learning. When you add a new piece of information to your notes, you’ll add it in the correct box for its corresponding category, type, or characteristic. This creates a clean visual reference guide you can use when studying, memorizing, and self-quizzing later on.
Because of the extra time it takes to process each new note and identify its corresponding box, charting notes are great when following a pre-recorded lecture that you can pause and rewind.
Click here to view and download the free LearnChangeDo Charting Notes Template for Notion.
Mind Mapping
Mind mapping notes are great for visually organizing new ideas, information, and concepts into a cohesive “structure.”
Think of a mind map as a “tree of knowledge” that breaks down individual concepts into their component ideas as a tree trunk splits into branches. Out of each new concept can be additional concepts, on and on, until an entire topic, concept, or idea is fully broken down. Mind maps are great for learning strategies like fractalizing and can also be easily turned into spaced retrieval resources for use during the engagement phase of learning.
Mind mapping works great for exploring new ideas or gaining a greater understanding of a topic or concept that’s currently hard to understand.
Organizing Your Learning Notes
Well-organized notes make it easy to find precisely what you need right when you need it.
There are a variety of physical and digital tools you can use to capture and organize your notes. The LearnChangeDo system encourages using a single commonplace database of Learning Notes via Notion, where you can tag and update your notes regularly.
Click here to download the LearnChangeDo Learning Notes template for Notion.
Reviewing and Updating Your Notes
Reviewing Your Notes
Well-organized notes are the starting point for effective studying.
After you’ve captured your learning notes and have organized them for quick access later on, it’s time to enter the third phase of learning: engagement. During this phase, you’ll take everything you’ve captured in your notes and start memorizing, practicing, and studying it. Here are some additional LearnChangeDo articles that you can use to succeed at practicing, studying, and memorizing:
Updating Your Notes
One benefit of curating and organizing effective learning notes is that you are essentially building your own personal library of knowledge over time.
In the future, you might encounter a situation that requires you to revisit previous learning notes. Rather than simply opening up and re-reading your notes, one great strategy is to update and improve them each time you revisit them.
Here are a few ways you can update your notes each time you revisit them:
Make important information and key ideas bold. If you review your notes a second time and realize that specific parts or individual lines are extra important, make them bold. This way, when your future self returns to those same notes, you’ll be able to visually skim and identify the essential information and insights immediately. Making critical information bold can decrease the time required to find what you’re looking for and help you zero in on the critical points in your notes.
Rewrite complicated or confusing parts. If a few sentences or sections of your notes are confusing or poorly written, then take the time to rewrite them more precisely and directly. This will also decrease the time it takes to find what you’re looking for in future reviews and help you understand the information better.
Enhance your notes by adding additional notes, references, and links you found since your last review. If you are actively studying something, you are probably already reading and consuming a lot of new information about that topic. If you’ve found additional helpful resources and links that can enhance your notes, add them directly in the notes themselves for your future self to benefit from.
Define and clarify terms. Suppose specific phrases or words need definitions or further explanation in your notes. In that case, you can use comments and other methods to add those definitions and explanations for your future self.
Add visuals. If certain sections of your notes would be better communicated or represented with a visual diagram or some graphic organizer, then add them to your notes. You can create these by hand, with existing images, or using mind mapping software.
Three Ways to Use What You Just Learned
Download the LearnChangeDo Learning Notes Database for Notion. This database (built for Notion) comes pre-populated with everything you need to start capturing, organizing, and reviewing all your learning notes, including pre-loaded note-taking templates and a filtering system that uses custom tags.
Pick a note-taking style and start capturing notes. Depending on what you’re currently learning, pick a note-taking style above and start capturing and curating learning notes right away.
Ask me a question here. Have a question about note-taking or how to study what’s in your notes? I’d love to hear from you!