The Value of Lecture Notes
The Value of Lecture Notes
Are there better ways to engage the spoken word?
Readers of Extra Muros will not be surprised to discover that, whenever I find myself in the company of young people, I try to spark discussions about schooling and self-directed education. Recently, in the course of such a conversation, as I compared forty-two hours of podcasts to the lectures given in a typical college course, a dropper of eaves pantomimed the act of typing on a keyboard. If I am not too badly mistaken, this latter-day Marcel Marceau was expressing the belief that the benefits of attending a college class had more to do with the taking of notes than the act of listening to the lecture.
Advocates of note-taking in class make four arguments. (To be more precise, they make a variety of claims, which, if I am not too badly mistaken, boil down to four arguments.)1
Taking notes forces the student to pay attention to something that lacks inherent interest. (I wrote “lacks inherent interest” because I thought it rude to use the word “boring.”)
Taking notes forces the student to focus on the key points made by the lecturer, rather than the material that the latter employs as an aid to delivery. Once he has notes in hand, moreover, the student can review the lesson without resort to his textbook.
Taking notes forces the student to focus on things that the lecturer deems important, thereby avoiding the waste of time and trouble that results from (horror of horrors) learning things unlikely to be on the test.
Taking notes forces the student to make sense of what he is hearing. (Some champions of note-taking call this “synthesis.” Others use terms like “integration” and “making connections.”)
In short, students should take notes while listening to a lecture because lectures are boring, textbooks are boring, and the important thing is pleasing the teacher. (Careful readers will notice that, in synthesizing the aforementioned justifications, I omitted the argument that note-taking promotes synthesis, integration, and the making of connections. I will address this proposition, which I regard as the most powerful argument in favor of note-taking, towards the end of this post.)
Benjamin Keep, who creates videos on the subject of learning, rejects all four of the arguments in favor of taking notes during a lecture. In particular, he observes that the need to reduce one point to writing while trying to listen to another puts the student in the awkward position of trying to solve perform cognitive tasks at one time. This, in turn, undermines the student’s ability to perform the definitive tasks of focusing, selecting, and integrating. Elizabeth Filips, who also makes videos about learning, agrees with Dr. Keep. In particular, Miss Filips points out that attempts to record specific facts mentioned in a lecture interferes with a student’s ability to make sense of the presentation as a whole.2
Both Filips and Keep recommend that, rather than taking notes during a lecture, students do so at some point after the end of the presentation. In particular, they prescribe a technique, variously called “active recall” and “free recall,” that calls for the student to revisit, whether on paper, in speech, or in the privacy of his own mind, the message that the lecturer was trying to send.
This technique, I suspect, offers benefits to self-directed learners who make use of learned podcasts. Thus, for example, an autodidact who listens to recorded monologues while driving to (and from) his place of work might keep a notebook in his car. After arriving in the parking lot of his place of work or the driveway of his home, he could writes a few sentences on the subject of the podcast he just enjoyed. These might summarize the points made, express the essence of the program, or record questions for further exploration.
In addition to helping a self-directed learner to make the most of his listening time, an “active recall notebook” might help him in his search for podcasts that complement the ones he has listened to in the past. It would also help the autodidact decide whether or not he wishes to listen to the episode in question for a second (or third, or fourth) time.
After all, like love and books, MP3s are wonderfully patient things.
For Further Reading:
“He who grasps the problem as a whole, has calmed the storm that rages in his soul.” Friedrich Schiller The Homage of the Arts [Die Huldigung der Künste].
Webpages arguing for the taking of lecture notes abound. Thus, rather than providing links, I will simply recommend that readers interested in such things run internet searches on such phrases as “why take lecture notes.” Readers who wish to explore the roots of present-day note-taking can use the “advanced search” feature on the Hathi Trust website to look for arguments made in days of yore.
While I can see the argument against taking notes, there is one thing that I know about myself. Writing notes long hand with a pen or pencil instead of taking notes typing with a computer is MUCH better. First, you write less down. I simply cannot write long hand as fast as type. Therefore, you distill down what you write. However, I think the most important reason to write notes longhand is the tactile memory of the writing helps me to remember more. While I was in law school most people used computers, I think writing my notes longhand, as messy as it was, served me well.