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There are a variety of reasons why note-taking is an important skill to master. These include keeping track of what you learned during a class lecture, helping you engage with material during class, and creating a resource to help you study for exams. Taking high quality notes will ensure that you have the best material to help you understand course information, remember that information long-term, and recall that information for assignments and exams.
This page covers several note-taking techniques and will provide additional resources to help you understand those techniques. It will be up to you to choose which techniques work best for you and the way that you learn best.
The Cornell Note Taking System is a popular system for taking notes originating at, as the name suggests, Cornell University.
In this system, the process involves dividing a page into sections as demonstrated in the image below.
In the large section labelled "Note-Taking Column", write notes from the class including important concepts, class examples, and questions you have about the material that you will address after class.
In the section labelled "Cue column", write key words and short phrases to represent class concepts. This is an excellent place to develop ideas for future studying including terms for flash cards or practice questions to test yourself.
The Summary section at the bottom of the page is for writing a brief summary (a few sentences) of your notes from the "Notes" section of your page.
(Image by WikiLinuz CC0, via Wikipedia.org)
The Outline Method for note-taking is a technique that helps to show how sub-topics nest within main topics by using a hierarchical visual structure. By using bullet points or numbers and indentation, you can easily show topics and their sup-topics, which may help you when studying later.
How to use the Outline Method:
An example may look like this:
1. Main concept
a. Sub-topic 1
1. Supporting Detail
2. Example
b. Sub-topic 2
Mind-Mapping is a more visual style of note-taking. It helps you organize information in a way that reflects how your brain works. Instead of showing information in a linear way, it instead starts with a central concept and shows the connections that branch out from that concept.
How to take Mind-Mapping notes:
Visit the additional resources below to go more in-depth into Mind-Mapping as a note-taking technique.
Student Success
This book offers study skills and practices for college and university students to help them make a positive transition to post-secondary education, learn how to be a successful student, and make the most of their learning experience. This textbook was created to provide a resource for the ABE provincial level course, Student Success, and it provides resources to meet all the required and optional learning outcomes. The course can be used an elective course towards the BC Adult Graduation Diploma. Students don’t need to be taking a Student Success course to benefit from this text. Post-secondary students can use this material to help them become better, more successful students. Faculty can use any parts of it to give to their students in any of their courses as applicable. Others (anyone) can use applicable life skills chapters. The book is written so each chapter stands on its own as an independent topic and doesn’t require knowledge of previous chapters, so students and instructors can use only the sections they need.
