What a note actually contains
70 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.
- State what proportion of lecture ideas and images students record in their notes, with the caveat its own authors attach
- Explain why a count of what a note contains means nothing without the denominator
- Apply the denominator question to a note of the reader's own
Lesson 1 said a note serves two functions and that the review carries most of the benefit. This one is about the raw material both functions have to work with, and the measured answer is a smaller number than most people would offer.
The number
The 2024 meta-analysis, in a section about what the studies it pooled failed to report, gives the figure this lesson is built on.1 In their words: "The existing literature that does report the total number of ideas and images presented during lectures suggests that college students record a small fraction of lecture-presented ideas (about 30%)".1 They give three citations for that, and then the same again for the other half: "and images (about 10–20%)".1
About three ideas in ten. Somewhere between one image in ten and one in five.
That isn't a finding about bad note-takers in those lecture halls. It's what note-taking looked like wherever anybody counted. The speaker is still speaking while you write, and nothing read for this course measures writing speed against speech, so take the next sentence as the lesson's own reasoning rather than a finding: if you cannot write everything, selecting is the whole job.2
And the same section says how little of its own literature counted anything. In their words: "Only nine of the studies included in our analysis reported the number of lecture ideas students recorded in notes... and just three reported how many lecture images were recorded."1
The thirty percent and the ten to twenty come from three cited papers, and the meta-analysis does not say whether those are among the nine and the three. Either way the base is thin, and reading it as thin is this lesson's judgement rather than the authors' statement.2
Before you read on. Suppose a study tells you students recorded an average of thirty-four ideas from a lecture. Is that a lot? Write down what you would need to know to answer.
Show the answer
Most people reach for the sample size, and the sample size isn't the problem here.
The number you need is how many ideas the lecture presented. Thirty-four out of forty is a different world from thirty-four out of two hundred, and the study as described doesn't tell you which.
The meta-analysts make the same complaint about their own field, in their own words: "Knowing, for example, that students recorded an average of 34 lecture ideas is inconsequential without knowing the number of lecture ideas presented. Yet, most of the studies reviewed (n = 15) did not indicate the total number of ideas or images presented during lectures."1
Fifteen studies never reported the denominator at all. Their own verdict on that, verbatim: "Neglecting to do so obscures treatment effects and neglects to ascertain note-taking's true achievement effect."1
And this is the same question in a third disguise. Focus and Deep Work lesson 1 called it the instrument question: before asking whether a claim is true, ask what would have had to be measured. Memory lesson 7 called it the sample question: ask how many people, and who. This course's version is the denominator: ask what the count is a count of.
Why the denominator is the lesson and the 30 percent is not
The figure will date. The habit won't, and it's worth being precise about what the habit is.
A count of what is in a note is a numerator. It tells you how much was written. On its own it tells you nothing about how much was available to write, so it tells you nothing about whether the note is complete, thin, or as full as anybody's could be.
Notice that this cuts against the direction most people assume. A long note isn't evidence of a good one, and lesson 5 has the measured version: typed notes reliably contain more words than handwritten ones, and that volume has not bought typists an advantage over people writing by hand.
And it cuts against the other direction too. A short note isn't evidence of a careless one. If the thing worth keeping was four decisions, a four-line note is complete.
One note, two denominators
This case is constructed, because no source read for this course reports an individual note against the material it came from.2
A forty-minute talk contains, on a careful count, sixty distinct ideas. Ranjit writes down eighteen of them.
Against the talk, Ranjit captured thirty percent, which is about what the research reports for students in lectures.1 By that measure his note is unremarkable.
Ranjit captured thirty percent of the talk, which is about what the research reports. Before you read on: is there any number you could be given that would make that a good note rather than an unremarkable one?
Show the answer
There is, and it is not a number about the talk.
It is a number about what he went for. A proportion needs a denominator, and the talk is only one of the denominators available. The next paragraph gives the other.
If you wrote "no", you are in good company, because the talk is the denominator every study in this literature uses, and it is the one that can be defined in advance.
Now change the denominator. Ranjit went to the talk for one reason: he needed to know what the speaker recommended about pricing. The talk contained four ideas about pricing. His note has all four.
Against what he needed, Ranjit captured a hundred percent. Same note, same talk, same afternoon, and two numbers that would lead to opposite verdicts.
Neither number is wrong. They answer different questions: how much of the talk is in the note, and how much of what he came for is in the note. The second question is almost never the one studies ask, because a study needs a denominator it can define in advance, and the reader's own purpose isn't that.
If a note in those lecture studies only ever contained a third of what was said, why bother with the rest? Should a note-taker just aim at the thing they came for and ignore the rest?
Show the answer
It's the right question and the honest answer has two halves.
Yes, in the sense that a purpose gives you a denominator you can actually meet. Ranjit's four pricing ideas are a target. Sixty ideas aren't, and aiming at them produces a note that's longer, worse, and takes your attention away from the room.
And no, in the sense that you don't always know what you came for. A note aimed narrowly at the thing you expected is a note with nothing in it about the thing you did not expect, and the second is often why the hour was worth attending.
What this course can say and what it cannot is worth being exact about. It can say that notes capture a minority of what is presented, in college lectures, in the studies that counted both sides.1 It can't tell you what to aim at, because nothing read for this course compares a narrow aim with a broad one on any outcome. That sentence is the lesson's own statement of its limit rather than a finding.2
So the useful version is a question rather than a rule: before the next thing you take notes on, decide what the denominator is. And notice how rarely anybody does.
Three things people get wrong about what is in a note
"A good note-taker gets most of it down." About thirty percent of ideas, in the studies that counted both sides, all of them college students in lectures.1 Nobody in those studies got most of it down.
"More words means a better note." Typed notes contain more words than handwritten ones, and lesson 5 is where that gets its evidence. The short version: more words has not bought typists an advantage over handwriters, and word count on its own has tracked better quiz scores in two studies. The volume is not the thing to read.
"If it isn't in my notes it wasn't said." About seventy percent of it was, in the lectures that were counted.
Practice
Take 25 minutes, in two sittings.
Find a talk you can replay. A recorded lecture, a conference talk, a long podcast segment. Anything between ten and fifteen minutes, because you are going to watch it twice and count everything in it.
Sitting one: watch it once and take notes as you normally would. Don't adjust your habits for this exercise, because the habits are what you're measuring.
Sitting two: watch it again with the notes beside you, and count two things.
- The ideas the talk presented. You will have to decide what counts as one idea, and write your rule down before you start counting, because deciding as you go gives you the number you expected. 2. The ideas that made it into your notes.
Then the ratio, and two lines.
- What kind of thing you dropped. Examples, qualifications, numbers, anything said quickly.
- Whether you'd want any of it back, which is a different question from whether you missed it.
A low ratio is the usual result on this course's expectation rather than on any measurement, and it isn't a verdict on you.2 The point of the exercise is that you now know your own number and have some idea what falls out of it.
Take 15 minutes.
Take one page of notes you made more than a month ago, from something you cannot replay: a meeting, a conversation, a talk that was not recorded.
Write down three things.
- What you can still tell from the note, listed.
- What the denominator was, as far as you can now reconstruct it: what else was said that day.
- How much of that reconstruction is guesswork.
Then one line: what you would have had to write at the time to make that page readable now?
Usually it isn't more detail. This course has measured nothing about this and the next sentence is its expectation: it is a sentence of context at the top, which takes seconds and is the thing nobody writes, because at the time the context is obvious.2
Connections
Back. Lesson 1 gave the two functions, and this lesson is about what both of them have to work with. Focus and Deep Work lesson 1 is the instrument question and Memory lesson 7 is the sample question; the denominator is the same habit in a third place, and this course uses all three rather than re-deriving them.
Forward. Lesson 3 is the most famous study in this subject, whose proposed mechanism is about what kind of thing gets into a note rather than how much. Lesson 5 is where the word-count difference between typed and handwritten notes gets its evidence, and its verdict.
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 the first of its four limitations subsections. Read that limitations subsection, which is the source of every figure in this lesson.
- How Much Mightier Is the Pen than the Keyboard for Note-Taking? (Educational Psychology Review, 2019). Read at abstract level only by this course, which is lesson 1's and lesson 4's source and is worth having in front of you before either. Nothing beyond its abstract is described here, because nothing beyond its abstract was read.
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, the introduction, the Table 6 comparison of meta-analyses, the discussion of note-taking quantity, and the first of the four limitations subsections, which is where everything in this lesson comes from. The results tables other than Table 6 were not read, and lesson 1's scope table records the read level. Supports: the quoted figures of about 30 percent of ideas and 10 to 20 percent of images; the quoted statement that only nine studies reported ideas recorded and three reported images recorded; the quoted complaint about the missing denominator with its fifteen studies; and the quoted verdict on what neglecting it obscures.
- Ranjit and the talk are constructed, and the lesson says so where they appear; the sixty ideas, the eighteen and the four are invented to show the two denominators and are not a reported result. The statement that nothing read for this course compares a narrow aim with a broad one is the course's own, said as such in the checkpoint. So is the judgement that the evidentiary base for those figures is thin, said as such where the nine and the three appear, and so is the reasoning that a note is partial because you cannot write everything down, which is labelled at the point of use: nothing read for this course measures writing speed against speech. The claim in the second exercise that a sentence of context is usually what is missing, and the claim that a low ratio is the usual result, are this course's expectations rather than measurements, and both exercises say 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.