The Values of Note-Taking

“Can I take notes using my laptop?”

I get asked this question every year by a small handful of students. The vast majority of my students still come to class on the first day with notebook in hand and a pen or pencil. My stock answer is “Yes, if your laptop use doesn’t distract classmates, but I should let you know that most students find it overall easier to take notes by hand.” There are several reasons for this. Chemistry class features drawing molecular structures, writing chemical equations, doing some math, and sketching experimental setups. I also write quickly on the board and my class proceeds at a relatively quick pace, as my students will attest.

Recently, a few students started using their tablets to take notes. Last semester, one of my new research students did this regularly. In my general chemistry class, another student (who asked me permission on the first day of class) seemed to take notes with ease while doing really well in the class. I decided to ask these students how and under what context they find note-taking efficient with the tablet. It’s only a sample size of two, but I learned that the students tend to use the tablet in their science classes because (a) instructors allowed it, and (b) there was a combination of typing text and drawing structures/equations/graphs. Apparently it’s a bit more challenging to just keep typing straight text in a humanities or social science lecture, and also some of these instructors don’t allow the use of electronic devices. Both students were very fluid in their use of the tablet, and they both had Apps that worked well for them.

“How can I learn to take good notes in your class?”

I’ve never actually been asked this question in class. Not sure why. Perhaps there was a tacit assumption that students should know how to take notes after being in school for so many years before college. I assumed it. The students themselves also assumed it, even if they had suboptimal strategies. It was only after several years of teaching that I started putting together a “how to study for this class” guide. One point exhorts students to read the relevant sections of the textbook ahead of time so they wouldn’t try to write every single word I say (or write) in class. That way they can focus on the most salient and important things. I’m not sure how well this has worked, although last semester when I had several students in my office hour, one remarked to another how reading ahead of time had really helped her follow along in class. I quietly smiled to myself.

I’m sure there are a plethora of note-taking advice websites. (I haven’t checked.) More interestingly, from Ann Blair’s book Too Much To Know, I learned that instructional manuals on note-taking began to flourish in the seventeenth century. The second chapter of her book is devoted to the art and science of note-taking from a historical perspective. (For highlights of the first chapter on information management, see my previous post.) I also learned that “the first manual solely devoted to excerpting, or note-taking from reading, was composed for students in the advanced or rhetoric class at Jesuit colleges by Francesco Sacchini (1570-1626).” The translation of the manual’s title is “A Little Book on How to Read with Profit”. It was published in multiple editions and even had translations from the original Italian into French and German.

Blair discusses one potential source of the popularity of note-taking manuals: extracurricular instruction. “Early modern professors earned extra income by teaching private courses on topics that held special appeal to students, typically because they were fashionable or practical, including courses on study methods and note-taking.” Need that extra edge as a student in a competitive world? Sign up for Complete Note-Taking Best Practices from renowned Professor So-And-So! But even so, manuals were incomplete. Different courses and instructors had their idiosyncracies. Furthermore, there was a belief that the best methods should be kept secret to maintain a competitive edge. Sounds like what the alchemists would do. Why be secretive? One advice-giver suggested that “[other] people would be most impressed by achievements that they did not understand.”

A historical survey of annotations reveals similarities and differences from practices today. Blair writes: “Pupils typically wrote down commentary dictated to them in class; and in books of all kinds one can find annotations that are irrelevant to the text, from family or other records entered in the flyleaf of a book for safekeeping, to doodles and penmanship practice, to recipes, prayers, or poetry written down in a book apparently for the convenience of the writing surface it offered. In the main, however, especially in Latin books, early modern annotations in the margins and flyleaves were reading notes – not personal responses of the kind found in more recent periods, but notes primarily designed to facilitate retrieval and retention of interesting passages. Annotations might make corrections to the text, add cross-references, … words of praise or criticism…” If not for those annotations by the Half-Blood Prince in his copy of Advanced Potion Making, the sixth Harry Potter book might have been a lot less interesting.

One place where we do teach students specific note-taking skills is the first-year General Chemistry laboratory. Keeping a good lab notebook is an important skill for the chemistry student (and potentially future scientist). While there are specific protocols to follow, students are also encouraged to write down their observations, and the thought process that led to their tentative conclusions. Nothing is erased. Errors are cleanly crossed out with a single line. Research lab notebooks have been a boon to historians of science piecing together stories of discovery, often different from the cleaned-up version coming from the scientist’s own recollection many years later. Memory is a fickle thing.

But because memory is fickle, down through the ages, an individual with a seemingly prodigious memory was, according to Blair, “highly regarded as a sign not only of intellectual ability but also of moral worth.” Scholars in the old days spent a substantial amount of time memorizing substantial material. In the widely reprinted note-taking manuals by the Jesuits (Sacchini and Drexel), memory was improved first by the act of writing the notes, and then later re-reading the notes during subsequent recall. Before the laptop, tablet or smartphone, the notebook was what you carried around – since you wouldn’t want to lug a pile of books around. You could study it anytime, anywhere!

Prior note-taking also helps when you are writing, according to Drexel who “asserted that all abundant writers relied on collections of excerpts gathered over years of reading… [but] offered no empirical evidence to support his claim…” Apparently the elder Pliny was a prodigious note-taker, according to his namesake nephew Pliny the Younger. Thomas Aquinas, on the other hand, seemed to compose more from memory than from notes, at least according to the historical information available. But if you have stacks and stacks of notes, how will you find what you need? Blair’s book is about information management down through the ages. So it turns out one Thomas Harrison sometime in the 1640s, while in prison, wrote up a design for a “note closet”.

The picture above, based on Harrison’s description, comes from De arte excerpendi (1689) by Vincent Placcius. Apparently this influenced the great Gottfried Wilheim Leibniz to have one constructed for himself. Mobile slips of paper were the key “invention”, not so much the cabinet itself. A line can be drawn from slips of paper to the index cards of library catalogs. Dewey (of Dewey Decimal fame) even standardized the size of such index cards. And coming full circle, I regularly see students using a stack of index cards as they prepare for exams.

I used to regularly take notes while reading when I was in college and graduate school, back before widespread Internet use and search capability. I no longer do so, but I’m not sure why. Laziness perhaps. Or Search-ability. Blair’s chapter is making me ponder the value of taking up the practice again. Maybe I read too lazily, and therefore do not learn as much as I should. Writing blog posts on what I read functions partly as an external memory aid, a searchable one in particular. I’m also pondering whether I need to do a bit more in helping students take useful and good notes in my chemistry classes. Or maybe I should lead a discussion on what is known about Effective Learning Techniques. More to ponder.