Take Notes From the Pros
By LAURA PAPPANOOCT. 31, 2014
When it comes to taking lecture notes, Laura Gayle, a sophomore at Florida State University, has
her methods. A smiley face connotes an important person. If the professor says, “Make sure you
know this,” she uses an asterisk. A triangular button signals a video clip played in class. Later,
she will organize the notes, write a video summary and check uncertainties against the textbook
or with the professor. For “Introduction to Classical Mythology,” she’ll even alphabetize a list of
Greek gods and goddesses.
Then, a few days before the exam, she puts it all up for sale.
Since last fall, when she uploaded her macroeconomics notes onto Flashnotes.com to pay for a
birthday gift for her mother, Ms. Gayle has sold more than 500 copies of the study guides that
she’s put together for her courses, made over $3,285 and tapped into a growing, if controversial,
online marketplace.
In describing her approach, Ms. Gayle, a human resources major with a 3.8 grade-point average,
sounds aggressive in the best way. “I sit in the front row center for every single class, whether I
am selling notes or not,” she says. “For me it is a matter of paying attention, being detail-oriented
and,” if something is unclear, “taking the initiative to go out and find the answer.” Her study
guides are rated five stars by users…..
The demand is not surprising. “Students are notoriously poor note-takers,” says Kenneth Kiewra,
professor of educational psychology at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. They tend to record
only a third of the important lecture points.
What makes notes great? “Completeness,” Dr. Kiewra says.
Research shows that having detailed, comprehensive notes raises test performance. In his oftcited 1985 study, published in Human Learning, Dr. Kiewra randomly assigned 100 students to
one of seven groups. Forty-eight hours after a lecture, the groups had 25 minutes to review
before a test. Each group was assigned a learning method: Take your own notes and review (1)
your notes, (2) your notes as well as instructor notes, (3) without any notes. Don’t take notes but
review (1) instructor notes, (2) without any notes. Skip the lecture but review (1) instructor notes,
(2) without any notes.
Groups that reviewed instructor notes performed best. “It didn’t matter so much what you did
during the lecture,” Dr. Kiewra explains. “It mattered what notes you had.” Even those who
didn’t attend the lecture but reviewed instructor notes did better than those who attended and
“reviewed their own crummy notes.”
He concludes: “The real value of note-taking is not so much in the taking as in the having.”
Getting down details along with main points is easier said than done. Average lecture speed is
100 to 125 words a minute, but college students listening to a lecture write 22 words a minute by
hand; they type just 33 words a minute. In his latest research Dr. Kiewra has found that when the
professor pauses three times to let students catch up and fill in missing information, they have
more “original, additional and total notes” than those who waited to revise immediately after a
lecture. If a student fails to note a particular point, Dr. Kiewra says, there is only a 5 percent
chance of recalling it later.
Videotaped lectures help. When students viewed a video twice, they recorded 53 percent of the
details, up from 38 percent, Dr. Kiewra says. Watching three times raised it to 60 percent.
Memory is a weak tool, but thinking about the information — paraphrasing rather than writing
everything verbatim — improves retention, according to a series of studies at Princeton,
published last April in Psychological Science. Students who took notes by hand rather than
laptop wrote less but performed better. Laptop users tended to merely transcribe a lecture “rather
than processing and reframing it in their own words”; they scored strikingly lower on conceptual
tests.
Alexandra E. Hadley, a Boston College junior who has posted 29 different offerings on
Flashnotes in the last year, uses paper for small discussion classes and a laptop for lectures. An
English and communications major, she says she thinks hard about points the professor stresses.
“I try to be very present in all of my classes,” she says. “That is key — focusing on what I am
doing.” That means considering points as you take notes and connecting new ideas with
information from earlier lectures. “I was taking notes in my research methods class and we were
talking about pop culture,” she says. “We touched on two theories, but it reminded me of another
one, so I threw that in my notes.”
Umar Zaidi, a Stony Brook senior from Queens double-majoring in political science and
sociology, prefers to grab a seat near a power outlet and tap away. “When you are typing you can
look at your professor,” he says. He reads over the syllabus before class, “so when the professor
mentions something that rings a bell, I type it up.” While typing he organizes material into
sections with main ideas, bullet points and asterisks….
Education Life is a quarterly section offering news and commentary about higher education. You
can reach us by emailing edlife@nytimes.com.