What a note is for
100 min
Two hosts talk the lesson through. The voices are synthetic; the script was written from this lesson and checked against it, and asserts nothing the lesson does not.
- Distinguish the encoding function of a note from the external-storage function, and say which one a described note is serving
- State what the field's own summary says about which function carries most of the benefit, and at what read level this course holds it
- Say what this course's evidence was measured on, and name one claim the course could not support
You have taken notes for years and nobody has ever told you what a note is for. This lesson is the answer the research gives, and it isn't the one most people would guess.
Two functions, not one
A note does two separate things, and the literature has had names for them since the 1970s. The 2024 meta-analysis this course leans on states them with its own attributions, and the definitions below are quoted from it.1
The encoding function is what taking the note does to you at the time. In their words: "The process of taking notes, versus listening without note-taking, aids lecture learning (i.e., the encoding function)".1
The external storage function is what having the note lets you do afterwards. In their words: "The product of taking notes is an external document of text and images that can be reviewed any time following the lecture to better commit noted information to memory (i.e., the external storage function)".1
Both help. The interesting question is which one does more of the work, and there the field's own summary is the thing most readers have never heard.
In their words again: "Although both functions aid learning, when the encoding and external-storage functions are compared, students who take and review their notes (external-storage function) tend to achieve more than those who take but do not review notes (encoding function)".1 They then give four citations for that, and follow it with the sentence this course keeps: "Such findings indicate that the primary benefit of taking lecture notes emerges from the review of notes."1
Read that last sentence twice. Most people believe the writing is what helps. The field's own summary of its own evidence says the reading afterwards is.
Before you read on. If the benefit is mostly in the review, what follows for how a note should be written? Write two sentences, then read what this lesson says.
Show the answer
Most people's first answer is "write better notes", and the useful answer is narrower.
What follows is that a note has two customers who want different things, which is this course's own way of putting it rather than a finding.7 The version of you writing it wants speed, because the speaker is still talking. The version of you reading it in a month wants a note that makes sense out of context, with enough around it to be found and understood. Those two aren't the same document, and the research's finding is about the second one being used, not about how it was written.
And the second thing that follows is a question rather than a technique. If review is where the benefit is, then whether you review is the variable that matters most, and almost nobody has ever measured whether they do. That is what this course's project is, and its first section is one of this lesson's exercises.
What doesn't follow is a method. Nothing this course read says a particular format makes a note more reviewable, and a lesson claiming one would be going past its evidence.
The result that makes the encoding function worth arguing about
Before the finding. Morehead and colleagues ran the famous study again and added a condition nobody had thought to include: a group who took no notes at all. What would you expect that group to do, against the groups who took notes?
Show the answer
Almost everybody expects them to do worse, and the useful part is what follows either way.
If they do worse, you have a measurement of the encoding function on its own, and it is the first one anybody had.
If they do not, you have not shown that note-taking is useless. You have shown that in this experiment, on this test, at this delay, writing something did not separate people from writing nothing. Those are very different sentences and the difference is what the rest of this section is about.
Write down which you expect before you read on, because the result is much easier to explain away once you know it.
One finding should unsettle anybody who takes the encoding function for granted.
Morehead, Dunlosky and Rawson ran a replication of the most famous study in this subject and extended it. This course read their abstract and not the paper.2 Some trends in their data favoured longhand, they report, and then, in their words: "performance did not consistently differ between any groups (experiments 1 and 2), including a group who did not take notes (experiment 2)".2
A group who wrote nothing did not do worse than the groups who wrote something.
That isn't a finding that note-taking is useless, and the lesson won't let you take it that way. It is a finding about one experiment, measured on a test soon afterwards, comparing the encoding function against nothing. The storage function was not what that comparison was about, and in the same abstract the authors report that group differences shrank further "after students studied their notes".2
What it does show is that the encoding function isn't the obvious, large, reliable thing everybody assumes it is. If simply writing during a lecture produced a big benefit, a no-notes group would have shown it.
What this course is, and what it is not
Two earlier courses on the Core have already taught things this course needs, and it uses them rather than repeating them.
How to Learn Anything taught retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving and the difference between storage strength and retrieval strength. Memory taught that remembering is reconstruction rather than playback, what retrieving one thing costs its neighbours, and the question of who a finding was measured on. This course uses all of that and re-teaches none of it. Lesson 7 is where the three courses meet most directly, because a review routine for notes is retrieval practice applied to a document.
What this course adds is the document itself. Not how memory works and not how to study, but what a note is, what gets into one, and what the evidence does and does not say about how to make one.
It won't tell you which way to take notes. That isn't modesty: it's lesson 5, where five syntheses of the same question give five answers.
And one refusal is worth stating now. This course can't tell you whether your notes are any good. It reports what note-taking does across people, under conditions somebody arranged and measured, and that is a different question from auditing one person's notebook. Lesson 8 comes back to it with the whole course behind you.
What the evidence was measured on
This course reads six things at the levels the table below gives, and only one of them at any depth. Here is what each was measured on, and how far this course got into it.
| The source | What it measured | On whom | Read at |
|---|---|---|---|
| The 2024 meta-analysis[1] | Achievement and note volume, typed against handwritten, pooled | 24 studies across 21 articles, college students | Abstract, introduction, two sections, one table, one limitation |
| The replication and extension[2] | Test performance across note-taking media, plus a no-notes group | Students, two experiments | Abstract only |
| The famous 2014 study[3] | Performance on conceptual questions, typed against handwritten | Students, three studies | Abstract only. The paper was not opened |
| The direct replication[4] | Quiz performance and note contents | 74 laptop and 68 longhand participants | Abstract only |
| The 2022 meta-analysis[5] | Academic performance by note-taking method | 77 effect sizes from 39 samples | Not read. Its counts reach this course from a search summary |
| The handwriting EEG study6 | Brain connectivity while writing single words | 36 university students | Abstract and one sentence. Open access |
Read the third column. Every figure in this course but one was measured on students in a lecture, tested within the hour or within the week. The exception measured thirty-six people writing single words, with no learning outcome at all.
So a sentence beginning "note-taking improves retention" is already out of scope at the third word, unless the person saying it means a student in a lecture hall. And it cuts both ways: a narrow finding isn't an empty one, and the 2024 meta-analysis pools twenty-four studies. What the scope rules out is the sentence "so you should", applied to a reader in a meeting, reading a paper, or keeping a notebook over years.
Three notes from the same meeting
This case is constructed, because no source read for this course reports individual notes with their later use.7
Three people sit in the same hour-long planning meeting.
Priya writes almost nothing, but she writes it in her own words: four lines, each one a decision and who owns it. She never opens the page again. Encoding only. Whatever the writing did for her happened in the room.
Tom types nearly everything said, six hundred words, into a shared folder. Two weeks later somebody asks what was decided about the supplier and he finds it in forty seconds. External storage, and it worked. Whether the typing helped him at the time is a separate question.
Daniel writes a page of neat headings with two or three words under each, feels organised, and cannot reconstruct a single decision from it a week later. Neither function, on the course's own reading of the two definitions rather than on any finding.7 There is nothing in the page for a review to work with.
Notice what the sorting didn't depend on. Not neatness, not length, not medium. It depended on what happened to the note afterwards and on what was in it, which are the two things this course is about.
So if the review is where the benefit is, should you stop worrying about how you take the note and just make sure you reread it?
Show the answer
No, and the reason is the more useful half of the lesson.
Rereading a note you can't understand is worth nothing, which is Daniel's case above, and that sentence is this course's reasoning from the definitions rather than a measured result.7 The storage function needs a note with something in it, and what gets into a note is lesson 2's subject, where the numbers are worse than you think.
And rereading isn't the same as reviewing. How to Learn Anything lesson 3 is the whole argument here and this course does not repeat it: looking at a page again is the weakest thing you can do with it, and testing yourself against it is much stronger. A review routine that is only rereading is the storage function done badly, and lesson 7 is about doing it well.
So the honest version is: the review carries most of the benefit, the review needs a note worth reviewing, and what you do in the review matters as much as that you do it. Three things, and the one everybody attends to is the writing, which is in none of them.
And the limit, which this lesson states rather than hides: all of this was measured on students and lectures. Whether it describes your meetings isn't something this course can tell you, and the project is how you find out for yourself.
Three things people get wrong about notes
"The act of writing is what helps." The field's own summary says the review is where most of the benefit is.1 The writing is real and it's the smaller half.
"Taking notes obviously beats taking none." In one experiment, a group who took no notes did not perform worse than any note-taking group.2 One experiment, on an immediate test, and it's still more than most confident claims in this subject have behind them.
"A note is a record of what was said." It is a record of a fraction of it, selected under time pressure, and lesson 2 has the measured version.
What this course leaves out on purpose
Note-taking by school-age children. A different literature, not searched, and the policy arguments around it are live. Everything here is about adults.
Assistive and accessibility technology. Real and important, and this course has read none of it.
Shorthand and transcription systems. A different skill with a different evidence base.
Organisational knowledge management. Team wikis and institutional memory are a separate subject from a personal one.
Software. The apps will outlive none of this course's figures.
Practice
Take 30 minutes. This is section 1 of the course project and it cannot be done later.
Before you take a single note this week, write down two numbers and one list.
- How many notes you expect to take this week, counting anything you write down to keep.
- How many of them you expect to go back to, within a month, and what fraction that is.
- Which kinds you expect to return to, named specifically: meeting notes, reading notes, things somebody told you, your own ideas.
Then two lines. What you would do differently if the second number turned out to be almost none, and how confident you are in your estimate, out of ten.
Save it somewhere you won't edit it. The project compares it against what actually happened, and a prediction adjusted afterwards is worth nothing.
Most people's estimate is too high, and that is the course's own expectation rather than something it has measured.7
Take 25 minutes.
Find five notes you have taken in the last three months. Real ones, not the ones you're proud of. If you have not taken five, use what you have and say so, because how few there are is itself a result.
For each, write four things.
- What it was for, in one line.
- Which function it served: encoding, external storage, both, or neither.
- Whether you have reopened it, and if so, what you wanted from it.
- Whether it would still make sense to you in a year, honestly.
Then one line: how many of the five were still doing anything for you a week after you wrote them?
If the answer is none, that is what this course expects, though it has not measured it.7 It is also what lesson 7 exists for. A page of notes nobody reopens is the encoding function on its own, which is the half the evidence says is smaller.
Connections
Back. How to Learn Anything lesson 3 is retrieval practice, applied to notes in lesson 7 rather than re-taught. Memory lesson 1 is the reconstructive account, and its scope table is the form this lesson's table takes; Memory lesson 7 is the sample question the table is an instance of. Focus and Deep Work lesson 1 is the instrument question, and this course's lesson 2 is it applied to what a note contains.
Forward. Lesson 2 is what actually gets into a note, and the figure is lower than anybody guesses. Lessons 3 to 5 are the one question in this subject everybody has an opinion about, and what happened when people checked it. Lesson 7 is what to do after the note is written, which is where the benefit is.
Go deeper
- Typed Versus Handwritten Lecture Notes and College Student Achievement: A Meta-Analysis (Educational Psychology Review, 2024). Read in part by this course: the abstract, the introduction, one table and part of the limitations. Read the introduction, which is where the two functions are set out with the field's own attributions.
- How Much Mightier Is the Pen than the Keyboard for Note-Taking? (Educational Psychology Review, 2019). Read at abstract level only by this course. Read it for the no-notes group, which is the finding here that is hardest to sit with.
Sources
- Abraham E. Flanigan, Jordan Wheeler, Tiphaine Colliot, Junrong Lu and Kenneth A. Kiewra, "Typed Versus Handwritten Lecture Notes and College Student Achievement: A Meta-Analysis", Educational Psychology Review 36, 2024, article 78. Read in part: the abstract verbatim, the introduction, the Table 6 comparison of meta-analyses, the discussion of note-taking quantity, and the first of the four limitations subsections. The results tables other than Table 6 were not read, and the body says so in the scope table. Supports: the two quoted definitions of the encoding and external storage functions with the attributions the authors give them; the quoted sentence about which function carries the benefit; and the twenty-four studies across twenty-one articles.
- Kayla Morehead, John Dunlosky and Katherine A. Rawson, "How Much Mightier Is the Pen than the Keyboard for Note-Taking? A Replication and Extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014)", Educational Psychology Review 31, 2019, pp. 753 to 780. Read at abstract level only, from the ERIC record, and the body says so. Supports: the two quoted fragments about the no-notes group and about group differences decreasing after students studied their notes.
- Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer, "The pen is mightier than the keyboard", Psychological Science 25(6), 2014, pp. 1159 to 1168. Read at abstract level only. The paper was not opened, which lesson 3 makes its subject. Supports only the scope-table row.
- Heather L. Urry and colleagues, "Don't Ditch the Laptop Just Yet", Psychological Science 32(3), 2021, pp. 326 to 339. Read at abstract level only. Supports only the scope-table row, including its 74 and 68 participants.
- Daniel Voyer, Scott T. Ronis and Narissa Byers, "The effect of notetaking method on academic performance", Contemporary Educational Psychology 68, 2022. Not read, and its sample counts reach this course from a search summary rather than from the paper or from source 1, which the scope table says. Source 1's own table gives this paper 73 effect sizes and a pooled effect of +0.008, and lesson 5 is where those numbers are used.
- F. R. Van der Weel and Audrey L. H. Van der Meer, "Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity", Frontiers in Psychology 14, 2024, article 1219945. Read at abstract level, plus one sentence about the typing condition. Supports only the scope-table row, including its thirty-six participants and that no learning outcome was measured.
- Priya, Tom and Daniel are constructed, and the lesson says so where they appear; no source read for this course reports individual notes alongside their later use. The observation that a note has two customers who want different things is this course's own, said as such in the predict block. The expectation that most readers overestimate how often they return to their notes is an expectation rather than a measurement, and the exercise says so.
Check your understanding
This lesson has a 6-question quiz. Pass it and the questions come back on a schedule in Review, so what you learned stays learned. Your progress is saved in your browser; no account needed.