When it comes to note taking for high-school and for college, I had moments where I struggled to retain everything from the lecture. During highschool my way of note-taking was to highlight every sentence in a text book and hopefully be able to understand the concepts explained by the teacher. That didn’t get me far in high school and I didn’t even attempt to try that in college. During the beginning of college, the fall semester of 2018 I tried to write down almost everything the professor spoke. My notes were very unorganized and I always walked out the class feeling confused. The notes I took were useless to the point where I struggled for an open note quiz. I was doing poorly on easy A quizzes and exams, the process of taking notes also affects your studying as well.
To explain what helped me and what potentially can help others I deceiced to show a note-taking strategy that was introduced in the video below. This method is called the cornell method. In this method you can take a piece of paper this can also work on a tablet and divide it into three parts. A left column going vertical down the side of the paper and a Lower column going horizontal towards the end of the page. After doing this there should be a nice space in the center of the page. For the left column you list questions, subheadings, topics, key ideas whatever you feel necessary. I like the 5w’s (who, what, when , where , why) and in the center of the page I write the notes from lecture answering those questions and at the lower end column I summarize what I learned during that class . This way I can actually retain the information taught in class that day and feel somewhat accomplished. This will also help when looking back into your notes to study, since this strategy is more organized than bullet points. The video also introduces another add on to improving the cornell method,learn more about it below.
Improving Cornell Notes with Sketchnoting Techniques