Speaker 1: I don't think you should take notes during lectures. The rest of this video explains why. I first became skeptical of the value of note-taking during lectures when I was doing some research on different forms of note-taking. I came across a lot of sentences like this one. Students are wise to take notes, as those who take and review lecture notes tend to have higher achievement than those who do not. What made me skeptical? Well, the first part of the sentence is a causal claim. But the last part of the sentence is presenting correlational evidence. Taking notes during lectures is generally perceived to be good practice. And if you want to be a good student, you tend to do the things that people tell you to do to be a good student. But to know whether taking notes during lectures actually helps you, you have to test the idea. That's when I came across sentences like this one. In prior research, performance outcomes have not been consistently higher for long-hand note-takers than for those who just listened to the lecture and did not take any notes. And that started me going down this rabbit hole of research on note-taking. But to understand what I found, we have to understand why note-taking might be helpful for learning in the first place. So note-taking during a lecture is supposed to help you learn in two different ways. The first way is called encoding. Physically writing down what you heard is supposed to help you remember what it is you heard. Evidence for the effectiveness of encoding is a bit mixed, but it probably does help you remember at least a little bit, just not as much as alternative methods. The second way that taking notes during lectures is supposed to help you learn is by reviewing your notes later. So that's what's called storage. So you have a kind of source that you can go back to to reread. Again, the same kind of story here. Rereading your notes is better than doing nothing, but it's probably not as good as alternative methods. However, there is a competing theory about note-taking during lectures, and that has to do with attention. While you are writing down what the lecturer just said, the lecturer is continuing to speak. During that time, your attention is split. So you have to pay attention to what you're writing, and ideally, under the encoding hypothesis, you are summarizing and interpreting what the lecturer is saying. But at the same time, you also have to be listening for the new information that is being said. Generally speaking, splitting your attention this way is a bad idea. It's a bad idea in almost any context. And the consequence is that learning suffers. Okay, so that is an argument against the idea of taking notes during lectures. But there's also an alternative approach, and the alternative approach is to leverage something that we know is pretty effective at long-term learning and deepening your understanding, and that is called free recall. Now free recall is not anything crazy or exciting. You just take a blank sheet of paper out or anything that you can write on, and you try to remember everything that you heard, and you try to maybe organize a little bit of it as you recall. So in a way, it's kind of like taking notes after a lecture or after you read something. This kind of free recall is effective in lots of different contexts, and it's effective just on its own without doing anything else. But it's particularly effective when you can see what was missed, when you can correct yourself in a way. So what does the research really say about all of these claims? One, and this is something that everyone agrees on, verbatim notes are very bad. If you think about it for a second, verbatim notes actually do not correspond with any of these theories. Now from the attention side, if you're taking verbatim notes, that means you have to write a ton, a ton, and you're essentially transcribing while the person is talking, and so you have to be writing extremely fast for that to even get down the notes. You've got to be missing something. So it's bad from the attention point of view. What about encoding? Encoding is about interpreting and understanding and synthesizing what's being said. So if you're writing verbatim notes, you're not doing that, so it doesn't really help you there. And finally, storage is kind of the same deal. If you are going back to reread your notes, you certainly don't want to read a transcript of what was said. You want to read kind of a summary of what was said, or main points, or even diagrams. So verbatim notes are bad, with the possible exception of taking notes on a laptop, where there are some research findings that say, eh, maybe it's not so bad on a laptop. And probably this has to do with how fast your typing speed is. If your typing speed is very fast, writing verbatim notes probably doesn't hurt you as much. There's a bunch of other differences between taking notes on a laptop and taking notes by hand, but I'm not going to get into those here. Now the second big finding, and this is going to come as no surprise to you whatsoever, is that if you take notes on the things that are actually tested on, you do better on those tests. Now whether this supports the encoding hypothesis or not is a little unclear, because when you take notes on something that the teacher said, you thought it was important, and you paid attention to that thing. And so, is it the case that you paid attention to it that was important, or was it the case that you wrote it down that was important? Well, probably a little bit of both, but if you pay attention to the right stuff, you end up doing well, and if you paid attention to the wrong stuff, whether you wrote that down or not, you probably are not going to do as well. The third thing, and this is the big one, is that taking notes during lectures doesn't really confer any extra advantages beyond taking notes after lectures, or doing what I called earlier a free recall session after the lecture. In controlled research, taking notes during a lecture doesn't even beat taking no notes and doing no review whatsoever. In this study, for example, the no notes group did just as well as any of the groups using any of the other note-taking methods on immediate tests. Now we know that in delayed tests, free recall approaches, or sometimes called self-testing approaches, beat re-reading by a lot, and this increases kind of the longer the delay that you take. In all the studies I read, I did not see a single study where taking notes during the lectures beat free recall on a delayed test. They either turn out to be the same, or free recall does better. Listen to this YouTuber explain his method.

Speaker 2: You need to preview the lecture. You need to look up words that you don't understand. You need to look up general concepts that you don't understand. You really need to get to grips with that before the lecture begins. You don't want to be struggling with things or googling words during a lecture. You want to do that beforehand so that you can focus on what the lecturers say, and that is my number one tip. So what I will do is, I will sit down after the lecture, no notes, nothing open. I'll get a nice A4 piece of card, and I will recreate what I learned from that lecture. And I will then add to those lecture notes, or to that kind of active recall card, with the annotations and the slides that I have.

Speaker 1: He's got it exactly right. Prepare for the lecture, take just minimal notes during the lecture, and then do free recall after the lecture. Taking notes during lectures might have made sense in a different era. If the only source of information is coming from that teacher in that one moment, and you have no other way of accessing what that information might be, maybe it does make some sense to take notes, even recognizing that while you are taking notes, you're probably also missing some of the other information from the lecture. But in today's age, a lot of lecture-based courses are on widely accessible topics. So a lot of lectures are recorded, so you can go back to a recording, you can look at a lecture transcript in some cases, you obviously have your textbook, or maybe a friend's notes to compare with, or lecture outline notes that someone else has created, or pretty much all of the internet to figure out what you may have missed in this particular lecture. Keep in mind that by taking notes during the lecture, you're almost guaranteeing that you are going to miss something. If you want to find out more about free recall, I have a video about that right here. See you next time.