8 ms·
The Cornell Note Taking System
- pcurve 4y agoI attended undergrad there 25 years ago. didn't know this system existed! I thought this thread was going to be about lecture notes that you used to be able to buy in case your own notes suck or you missed a bunch of lectures. Not sure if they still sell them though. (there was a specific name... if anyone here still remembers)
- tgflynn 4y agoThe referenced publication is from 2010. I went there too, more like 35 years ago. Maybe I would have done better if this sort of thing had been available back then.
- quartesixte 4y agoThis lines up with roughly when this system suddenly took stranglehold at my local school district.
- the_fury 4y agoNote that it's the 10th edition. I'm pretty sure the technique has been around since the 1950s. I certainly remember it from the 90s.
- tgflynn 4y agoIf that's the case it couldn't have been very well publicized, since I graduated from Cornell in 91 and never heard of it.
- meetingthrower 4y agoSame. I bought the "takenotes" which were pretty good. Also I met my wife after asking to borrow her notes for a class. So I thoroughly approve of the Cornell Not Taking Notes system!
- mywacaday 4y agoI wish this had been taught week 1 of college when I went in the mid 90s. All college's should have a mandatory module on note taking, learning techniques and general planning and productivity.
- seper8 4y agoSounds like a force multiplier for other courses
- 63 4y agoI'd also add general theory of education content to that. How do we expect people to learn if they don't understand teaching?
- zopa 4y agoNot so sure about mandatory. A system like this is pretty useless unless you’re motivated to use it. How much benefit would the students taking the module only because it’s required really see?
- all2 4y agoMost of the colleges I'm familiar with have "college success" courses that purport to teach things like this. I took one. I recall not paying much attention to it because it was in addition to my normal course load.
- cudgy 4y agoThese study techniques ought to be introduced even earlier like during middle school grades. Time management and information processing are key to a successful educational experience. The fact that this is not generally taught is a major deficiency in most schools.
- quartesixte 4y agoGoodness gracious. There is an entire generation of school children (at the very least in my locality) who were forced to use an incredibly poor implementation of this method by teachers who barely understood the intent themselves. On which we were punished for not doing correctly. The biggest gripe I had about this method was that the lessons in middle school and high school never had enough information density to make this meaningful in any way. Anyways, I can’t take notes like this anymore. Being punished an entire letter grade for not having enough questions on my notes when I was aceing every single test made me never want to take notes like this ever again. Edit: I’m sure this system works for some people but it definitely did not click with the way my brain retains information but being forced to try to learn in a manner that my brain did not want to learn has left me with a burning desire to never do it again.
- xattt 4y agoDon’t forget the argument made at the time that this is the way they learn in $OrganizationHeldInHighRegard, so you should do it too!
- mathman314 4y agoWere? It still happens. My friend's kids are forced to use such a system now. Note taking is about the note taker's relationship with the subject so it's idiosyncratic. A potentially useful technique can become a harmful prescription by stupid teachers. Showing student's lots of techniques and helping them develop there own methods seems more useful. But it is easier to make a rubric to test stuff like this then help a kid figure out what works.
- garbagecoder 4y agoThanks for the edit because most students have no clue how to do it at all. Sure, doesn’t work for everyone, but at least a way to do it can be taught. It’s like handwriting. Almost no one reproduces the letters perfectly, we all have our own writing but if we didn’t start with the standard letters we’d have no place to start. I imaging most people on this site did ok in school.
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- Veen 4y agoThe main thing I learned watching these videos is that Cornell students—or Americans more generally, perhaps—hold pens in a way that seems unusual to me. For example, with the thumb wrapped round the pen or with it gripped by the tips of all five fingers. Is that normal in the US? In the UK, I was taught to grip the pen with my thumb and forefinger tips and rest it on my middle finger. Most people I see writing hold the pen that way too.
- jszymborski 4y agoI'm unsure about these descriptions but in Canada/Qc this is the way I was taught to hold a pencil: https://www.fergusonvalues.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Hand-holding-a-pencil2.jpg https://www.fergusonvalues.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Ha...
- dunefox 4y agoWhich is the correct way.
- EduardoBautista 4y agoI have had terrible handwriting all my life. Could it be because I have been holding it wrong all this time? I hold by the tip of my index finger, middle finger, and thumb.
- dunefox 4y agoHandwriting is holding the pen, posture, technique, and practice. So yes, that's a factor.
- bluedino 4y agoThat isn't normal, most people hold a pen as you describe.
- woodruffw 4y agoThat's very weird. I'm an American and I hold my pen the way you do, which is the way I was taught. I had never noticed it before but now that I see it, the way the students are holding it in the video is very strange to me. Edit: apparently I do the "quadrupod" grip, while you do the "tripod" grip. But neither of those is what some of the students in the video were doing.
- easton 4y agoThey forced us to use this in middle and a little bit in high school, never really liked it. The usable space on the page to write details was so low compared to a blank piece of paper, and the summarizing I didn’t think really helped (especially if you needed all the details from the notes like in a history class). Other people like it though, maybe I was just doing it wrong.
- dang 4y agoRelated: The Cornell Note-Taking System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21989063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21989063 - Jan 2020 (66 comments) The Cornell Note-taking System (2001) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21674946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21674946 - Dec 2019 (41 comments)
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- eBombzor 4y agoYou know there's this going where people are starting to realize that extensive/fancy note taking is a gigantic waste of time. The only thing it needs to do is to offload cognitive thinking onto something external while you're learning so you can hold ideas. Most learning comes from recalling, not having beautiful notes.
- arkitaip 4y agoYes! Something happens when we take notes and that seems to improve learning but recall using flash cards is interestingly much more useful than re-reading the same notes. Anyone who wants to take a course in meta learning that's grounded in science is recommended to take the practical and free Coursera course Learning How To Learn: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn
- davikr 4y agoI haven't taken notes in months and I haven't seen any degradation to my learning, anedoctally.
- DwnVoteHoneyPot 4y agoYou know... the website/videos describe this. They say multiple times there is trade off between transcribing mindlessly vs. focused listening with no notes. The point of the Cornell system is activate thinking of the topic which is why they have a "cue" section for questioning, "summary" section for "what did i learn?". The first step Cornell did forget to mention for some people is to actually attend class before commenting.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- maphew 4y agoThe rash of "no way" responses makes me wonder: what note taking system(s) have you encountered that actually work for you? (And why, if known.) From someone who episodically takes notes in haphazard fashion and very rarely looks at them again, and thinks he's probably woefully working harder than he should as a result.
- gmane 4y agoI find for me personally, note taking is a way of forcing me to actively listen. Most of my notes are like yours: haphazard and rarely looked at again. The two things I do track are specific action items: those get a star in the margin so they can be found quickly and sometimes executives use specific wording they want you to emulate; that gets underlined and then offloaded to a reference document. I also make sure to be aggressive about giving my notes dates and titles for meetings so I know where/when notes are from.
- twojacobtwo 4y agoThough maybe not very useful directly for taking lecture notes, I like the Feynman technique for self driven learning. It's pretty sparse for layout and specific details, but the guiding principles are simple and keep you moving in the right direction: summarize your current understanding of a discrete topic in simple terms, iterate toward further simplicity as you learn more. ______ Step One: Choose the Concept You Want to Understand. Write it on the top of a sheet of paper. Step Two: Pretend You Are Teaching the Concept to a Child. Write an explanation of the concept on the paper as though you were teaching a child. Step Three: Stuck? Go Back to the Source Material. Re-read or re-learn the material until you can complete step two. Step Four: Simplify & Create Analogies. If your explanation is wordy or confusing, simplify the language. Create an analogy to help understand the concept. _____ https://law-hawaii.libguides.com/notetaking/feynman https://law-hawaii.libguides.com/notetaking/feynman
- baq 4y agohe is on record saying you can't really explain magnetism to a child ;) https://youtu.be/MO0r930Sn_8 https://youtu.be/MO0r930Sn_8
- chazeon 4y agoOn a personal note, I found any form of notetaking is distraction for me to grasping information... I really don't understand how someone could take good note while also listen... I found this only when I starting my PhD. I hope I know this sooner. Also, notetaking in any designed system is worse than a blank piece of paper for me. Not sure if any one would agree.
- gcarvalho 4y ago> I really don't understand how someone could take good note while also listen... I type moderately fast, only write when I think "I won't remember this" and review notes as soon as possible to address the pending points. I'm not bottle-necked by this, unless I'm doing a presentation.
- baq 4y agothat's right there in the article: > Research shows that taking notes by hand is more effective than typing on a laptop. IMHO this is an understatement made on purpose to stay as neutral in tone as possible and not offend anyone who disagrees. pen and paper note taking improves retention so much you shouldn't need the notes after you take them (well, unless you're writing down equations or whatever...)
- throw0101c 4y ago>> Research shows that taking notes by hand is more effective than typing on a laptop. A 2014 study: * https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797614524581 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09567976145245... News article on it: * https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret-don-t-take-notes-with-a-laptop/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret...
- parkaboy 4y agoResonate with this so hard. At some point I stopped taking notes completely early into my (engineering!) PhD and magically and all of a sudden this dense complex stuff started making sense. Was angry at myself for the difficult time I had during undergrad because of it.
- spritefs 4y agoImo taking notes just takes your attention away from the lecturer and it's best to only write down major details, if anything is written down at all Also since most lectures have some kind of recorded equivalent now, there is no scarcity with respect to the info the lecturer is communicating. So you can always go back and rewatch. Taking notes just gives you an excuse to not remember what you're hearing
- vincent-manis 4y agoThis, like any system, works better for some individuals than others, depending on their learning style. I liked the presentation here, basically “try this, you may find it valuable”. I'm sure that some people found it useless, others very useful. When I was teaching, students would sometimes ask me for permission to record the lectures. I always said yes, because I know that some students learn best aurally, and find note-taking interferes with their learning style. Teachers (or school systems) that mandate this system, and, even worse, GRADE NOTEBOOKS completely misunderstand the point of it. In K-12, one of the goals is to help students become effective learners, which involves students identifying the tools that help them learn best. I really like the SUMMARY section, asking the student to synthesize some kind of big picture. I always said that in a 50-minute university class, you can thoroughly explain one sentence and its ramifications. The space given for SUMMARY really asks the student to identify that sentence. And it also gives room for a really good question from a student: “Hey, teach, I can't figure out the summary for that class on recursion, can you help me?”, though, to be fair, no student ever called me “teach”.
- quanticle 4y agoTeachers (or school systems) that mandate this system, and, even worse, GRADE NOTEBOOKS completely misunderstand the point of it. In K-12, one of the goals is to help students become effective learners, which involves students identifying the tools that help them learn best. A single assignment forcing Cornell Notes (or any other note taking system) might be all right. Something like, "Here's a reading, please submit a summary of it in Cornell Notes format." That gets the kids to interact with the system, and it exposes students to something that they might find useful going forward. To force its use for an entire quarter or semester just sounds like sadism. Furthermore, from what I can tell, the Cornell system is highly tied to paper (and lined letter/A4 sized paper at that), and is basically useless outside of a school/university context. It doesn't do much to structure your notes. Instead, the class itself is assumed to be providing the structure, and the notes combine with the class structure to provide an outline of your knowledge. In the "real world", where information is coming at you from a dozen different sources, and it's up to you to provide your own structure, something like Cornell falls down, hard.
- 4y ago
- blahedo 4y agoOoooooh I have a burning hate for this system (the dislike is rational, the burning part is not entirely rational but justified). Way back in high school my AP history teacher not only taught us this (cool, that's part of his job) and checked that we were able to do it (reasonable), he required us to submit notes in this exact format, for every reading, all year, which he graded. After I determined that my comprehension and retention rate went down as a result of having to constantly interrupt my reading to follow the format, I stopped doing them and he got big mad that I was still doing great on all his tests using my own strategies. With a >90% test average he still gave me a C– in the class and tried to pressure me to cancel my AP exam and take a partial refund for it. I got a 4. (For the non-US folks: that's a 4 on a 5-point scale and generally means it will count for university credit, as indeed it did for me.) When I visited on a schoolday the next year, he saw me in the hallway and had the tremendous arrogance to ask me to pop into his class and tell them how much the notes helped. I was too unconfident at that point to do more than politely decline to do so, but modern me probably would have accepted the offer and then told the class exactly what I thought of them.... If they work for you, great! But no system is perfect for everyone. Assess what works for you, jettison the stuff that's wasting your time. ETA: This episode did teach me something very important, which was that as a teacher, when I'm teaching techniques if I think it's important enough I can require students to learn the technique and assess whether they are able to do it, but then I let them decide whether to use it in general or find something better.
- HideousKojima 4y agoMy middle school and high school required Cornell notes, and they were a huge pain in the ass. Never used them since.
- mindcrime 4y agoI'm reminded of a couple of my favorite quotes: "Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it." "Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless and add what is specifically your own" ~~ Bruce Lee
- ghaff 4y ago
- GTP 4y agoThe link isn't working for me.
- motoboi 4y agoI believe note systems are great! The only problem, and I see people talking too little about it, is that you need to create your own, for it to be effective. It's like trying to use spaced repetition with cards made by someone else, you loose 80% of the benefit. Creating, perfecting (and using) your own note system is what makes you a learning machine, as it let's you understand how your mind process and learn information. Your system is a reflex of your own mind, and exposes (reasonably) to you how the inner words. Very hard, thought, as you need a very high level of meta thought. Hence a lot of people see someone's else system and try to use it, benefit poorly from it. You can and should learn from other's systems, but to perfect what you made yourself.
- kupopuffs 4y agoperhaps even before that, people in general still lack the discipline and practice of note taking so a gentle reminder to start taking notes!
- imperialdrive 4y agohttps://github.com/djcabrera/psmodule-cnotes https://github.com/djcabrera/psmodule-cnotes ^^ Cornell inspired note system via PowerShell function/module. Thanks to Cornell, the OP, and your reply, I was inspired to do just that. Cheers! Edit. I am an absolute beginner with PS, so don't expect much from it.
- sfuller808 4y ago[dead]
- _Algernon_ 4y agoSounds like flashcards without the spaced repetition. Hardly revolutionary, and I'd bet SR would work better due to the preferential focus on cue-note combos with less retention.