Learning & Mind · Foundation

Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge

Everybody takes notes and almost nobody is taught how. This course is about the part that can be checked: what the evidence says about writing notes by hand against typing them, what the encoding and the external-storage functions of a note actually are and why the two pull in different directions, what happens to a note you never look at again, and what a personal knowledge system has to do to earn the time it costs. Its spine is one argument in three lessons: the most famous result in the subject, what happened when two teams checked it, and five meta-analyses of the same question that give five different answers. It takes retrieval practice and spacing from How to Learn Anything and the reconstructive account from Memory rather than re-teaching either. It is the fifth course of the term on running yourself.

What you'll learn

• Distinguish the encoding function of a note from the external-storage function, and say which one a described note is serving
• State what proportion of what is presented ends up in a note, and why a count of a note means nothing without its denominator
• State what the longhand-against-laptop study found, at what read level, and which half of it survived a direct replication
• Read a table of meta-analytic effect sizes and say what five different answers to one question mean
• Say what a measurement of brain activity licenses about a claim on learning, and what it does not
• Design a review routine for notes, and evaluate a personal knowledge system against the time it costs to maintain
• Read a claim about note-taking and say what would have had to be measured, and where