16 Note-taking
The second key stage of learning is tracking, digesting, and storing the information. This isn’t just for those who attend in-person modalities (face-to-face, hybrid, etc.). This applies to any classroom environment. Passively consuming information without jotting things down or annotating the text (or video, or audio) means you’re surfing the information rather than understanding it. And, even worse, it will be difficult to access that information later.
Taking notes is about two things: 1) encoding the information, so you can understand and recall it better later, and 2) organizing what you’re learning in ways that it can be more easily retrieved. The latter is becoming even more important as technology offers new ways to do things with the information we have at hand. If you’ve stored and organized your learning in predictable places, you will be able to compound the knowledge later.
Taking Notes
Beyond providing a record of the information you are reading or hearing, notes help you organize ideas and help you make meaning out of something about which you may not be familiar, so note-taking and reading are two compatible skill sets. Taking notes also helps you stay focused on the question at hand. Strong notes build on your prior knowledge of a subject, help you discuss trends or patterns present in the information, and direct you toward areas needing further research or reading.
It is not a good habit to transcribe every single word a speaker utters—even if you have an amazing ability to do that. Most of us don’t have that court-reporter-esque skill level anyway, and if we try, we would end up missing valuable information. Learn to listen for main ideas and distinguish between these main ideas and details that typically support the ideas. Include examples that explain the main ideas, but do so using understandable abbreviations.
Think of all notes as potential study guides. In fact, if you only take notes without actively working on them after the initial notetaking session, the likelihood of the notes helping you is slim. Research on this topic concludes that without active engagement after taking notes, most students forget 60–75 percent of the material over which they took the notes—within two days! That sort of defeats the purpose, don’t you think? This information about memory loss was first brought to light by 19th-century German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus. Fortunately, you do have the power to thwart what is sometimes called the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve by reinforcing what you learned through review at intervals shortly after you take in the material and frequently thereafter.
If you are a musician, you’ll understand this phenomenon well. When you first attempt a difficult piece of music, you may not remember the chords and notes well at all, but after frequent practice and review, you generate a certain muscle memory and cognitive recall that allows you to play the music more easily.
Notetaking may not be the mo