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One of the skills you will need to master quickly in your first year is the art of taking good lecture notes.
This page is intended to explain why this is important, and to give you some ideas about how to go about it.
contents
- Why take notes?
- How to take notes
- Note-taking systems
- Using your notes
- Support for students with disabilities
- Summary
why take notes?
For some courses, you may think that note-taking isn't necessary –
perhaps the lecturer gives out handouts, or the slides are on the course website.
However, even in these cases, you will come to realise that your own lecture notes are a valuable addition to what's provided: the lecturer may add details in the
lecture that aren't in the handouts, you may find that he emphasises some aspects of the lecture more than others (which might give a clue as to what's likely to come
up in the exam!), or – particularly for more mathematical topics – the
act of going through the explanation step by step may make it easier to understand.
In general, the reasons for taking notes in lectures include:
- it keeps you focused on the lecture (if you're taking notes of what the lecturer
is saying, you have to be listening to him, whereas if you're planning to rely on
the handouts, you may drift off into daydreams and miss important
details...especially if it's a 9 am lecture and you had an enjoyable evening in the
Union bar the night before...);
- as mentioned above, it gives you the opportunity to record details that aren't
in the handouts, or note down points that the lecturer seems particularly keen on
emphasising;
- it helps you to pinpoint areas where your understanding of the material is
incomplete, either during the lecture (if you find after a particular explanation
that you don't know what to write down, you probably didn't really understand it)
or afterwards (if you can't make head nor tail of your notes when you read them
over!), and therefore prompts you to ask questions while the material is still fresh,
and before it gets used to do something more complicated;
- it provides you with personal, customised revision aids.
how to take notes
Some general guidelines for effective note-taking are:
- Keep each course's notes separate.
- Use a loose-leaf folder, or different notebooks for each course, or one of those
"project books" with internal dividers, so that you can keep all the notes from each
course together and in the right order. The advantage of a loose-leaf folder is that you can also file printed handouts, returned homeworks, etc., in the same place, and
that you won't run out of space before the end of the course; the advantage of a
spiral-bound project book is that it's more robust (I'm sure we've all had the odd crisis when a loose-leaf folder has decided to open up all by itself, so you pull it
out of your bag and its entire contents fall out...).
What you definitely don't want is a single notebook with every lecture in
chronological order, so that maths is followed by physics is followed by astronomy
is followed by total confusion.
- If you're a reasonably proficient typist and have a laptop or tablet, you may
wish to take electronic notes. This is not a bad idea, but it does have
disadvantages: for example, it's much harder to record diagrams or mathematical
equations. Similarly, most lecturers will not object to your taping lectures
(though do ask permission before doing this), but the audio recording of
a lecturer drawing a diagram is unlikely to be very useful.
- Summarise.
- Unless you are proficient at shorthand or a touch-typist with a good laptop,
don't try to write down every word the lecturer says – you'll get writer's
cramp and your notes will turn into an illegible scribble (been there, done that).
Instead, try to summarise each point as the lecturer makes it – use lists and
bullet points, note down key definitions, underline or highlight anything that the
lecturer seemed to think was particularly important. (If you can't effectively
summarise something you've just heard, that's an important indication that you
haven't really understood it: go up at the end of the lecture and ask.) The only
case where it is important to write everything down is mathematical
derivations: do not just write down the equations: the words that surround
them are equally important! For example, they may include definitions of
variables (it's amazing how many different quantities are called m
or p), important approximations
("in the case where θ is a small angle..."), or explanations of what's going on
("if we now integrate this equation with respect to time..."). Without this
information, the equations alone may not make sense to you when you come to revise
them, or they may not even be valid.
- Review.
- Make a point of reading over your notes not too long after the lecture,
while you still remember what was said. Check that everything makes sense (if it
doesn't, and you can't figure out what's wrong, go and ask the lecturer). Highlight,
underline, or otherwise emphasise key points. Add anything you missed at the time,
e.g. definitions of symbols. Cross-reference to other lectures if appropriate.
note-taking systems
There are various standard systems of note-taking that have been developed to
try to make the process more efficient and/or more valuable as a learning tool.
These will not suit everyone: you should experiment with different methods to find
the style that works best for you, and it is quite possible that you will find that
you want to use different styles for different courses (for example, a descriptive
course like PHY106 may lend itself to a different note-taking technique compared to more mathematical courses like PHY101 or PHY104).
- The Cornell note-taking system
- This is a formal note-taking system that is widely recommended, especially in the
USA. The idea is that you divide your page into three sections as shown in the
diagram on the right. During the lecture you take notes; after the lecture you review the notes and use them to make a one or two-sentence summary at the bottom of the page and
insert "cues" (keywords, e.g. "Mars—structure", or cue questions, e.g. "How do stars evolve?") in the left-hand column.
The advantages of this system are that it requires you to review the notes promptly,
and that it provides an excellent basis for revision (cover up the notes, and see how well you can reconstruct them based on the summary and cues).
The disadvantage is the flipside of this: if you don't conscientiously review your notes and insert the summaries and cues, all you've got is a standard set of lecture notes and a lot of wasted paper!
- Guided notes
- This system combines handouts and note-taking: the lecturer provides skeleton notes with deliberate gaps and omissions, which have to be filled in by the student.
The advantage of this system over straightforward note-taking is that it lets the lecturer dictate the structure of the students' notes, which means that s/he can ensure that the material s/he considers important is properly emphasised.
The advantage over providing complete handouts is that the students have to listen to the lecture in order to fill in the missing bits.
- The disadvantage of this system is that it can feel patronising: the fill-in-the-missing-word aspect reminds students of primary-school exercises, and the fact that the lecturer has gone out of his way to make the handouts deliberately incomplete doesn't tend to go down well.
Some lecturers in the department who used to use this system have given up on it because it was so unpopular.
However, the common system of handing out – or making available on a
website – copies of Powerpoint slides can and should be treated as a form of guided notes.
Most lecturers' Powerpoint slides are in essence outlines: during the lecture they will add details, either verbally or by writing on the board.
If the handouts are formatted with plenty of white space, you can annotate them by adding these extra details, highlighting key points, etc.
This annotation process is very similar in principle and in effect to the guided note system.
- Mind maps, semantic nets, spider diagrams, etc.
- There are several rather closely-related techniques that emphasise relations between ideas rather than isolated statements of fact.
The idea is that you use tree or web structures to represent relations between concepts.
These can be hierarchical (breaking down a main idea into subtopics), sequential (either logically, A implies B, or chronogically, event X is followed by event Y), compare/contrast (e.g. similarities/differences between binary star systems and planetary system), or indeed any sort of association.
The key point is that encouraging the association of related ideas should help you to grasp the topic as a whole, rather than having to learn lots of apparently unrelated facts.
The example on the right (click to get larger version) shows a mind map that might be produced for the discussion of starlight in PHY111.
A hand-drawn version would probably have more pictures, and labels on the arrows.
- A disadvantage of drawing maps or webs during the lecture is that they can quickly get very messy, especially if it isn't immediately obvious where the links will end up, and it's not easy to continue them across multiple pages.
Therefore, if you do find them useful as revision tools or aids to understanding, it may be best to draw them after the lecture, as part of the review stage.
- Outlining
- This is the "Powerpoint slide" approach where you construct multiple levels of nested lists:
- Planets
- Definition of a planet:
- Orbits a star.
- Large enough to be spherical/nearly spherical (hydrostatic equilibrium).
- Massive enough to have cleared its orbital region — i.e. much the biggest thing in its neck of the woods.
- Solar system planets:
- Terrestrial: small, rocky, close to Sun. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars.
- Gas giants: very large, dominated by H/He atmosphere, intermediate distance from Sun. Jupiter, Saturn.
- Ice giants: intermediate size, less H/He, more ices than gas giants, far from Sun.
Uranus, Neptune.
- Extrasolar planets:
- Very common — hundreds discovered.
- Solar system pattern not universal, e.g. hot Jupiters, low-mass gas/ice planets.
- Dwarf planets.
This system works quite well for topics that lend themselves to this kind of hierarchical structure, but it does make it difficult to add material or modify later, and it doesn't bring out key points or interrelationships very well.
Also, some topics just don't have this kind of structure – for instance, an entire lecture might be devoted to a complicated mathematical derivation.
You can, of course, combine outline notes with other styles – the "note
taking" section of your Cornell notes might consist of outlines, or you might convert outlines to mind maps during review.
At this point it may be worth reiterating that how you take notes is less important than ensuring that you do take notes.
There have been studies showing that people who use the Cornell system perform better in subsequent tests than people who just took ordinary notes, but I suspect that this may have more to do with the fact that this system prompts you to review your notes after the lecture than it does to the actual form of the notes.
Use whichever method or combination of methods suits you best.
using your notes
However well structured and clear your lecture notes are, they will not do you much good if you don't look at them.
Sadly, simply filing them away neatly in a folder and carrying it round with you will not miraculously transfer their contents to your brain.
The main ways in which you can (and should) make active use of your notes are as follows:
- Read and review.
- As already mentioned, shortly after the lecture you should read over your lecture notes, in conjunction with any handouts you were given, textbook sections you were told to read, or course website pages.
Is there anything that you don't understand, or that doesn't seem to make sense, or where different sources say different things (e.g. the lecture notes disagree with the textbook)?
If so, now is the time to sort it out. Go and see the lecturer, or your tutor, and explain what the problem is.
It may be a simple mistake (e.g. you miscopied an equation) or a misunderstanding (you thought "chemical composition" referred to the whole star, your lecturer meant surface chemical composition).
Perhaps the textbook is out of date (the rate of discovery of extrasolar planets is in the vicinity of a hundred a year, so by the time any textbook has made it through the publishing process it's out of date, whereas your lecturer might have updated all her plots on the morning of the lecture),
or is making assumptions that weren't made in the lecture, or vice versa (e.g. one derivation is for circular orbits only, the other is also valid for elliptical orbits).
Maybe everything is basically right, but you just need a more careful explanation to see how things fit together.
Whatever the problem is, it is certain that getting it dealt with very soon after the lecture is preferable to not discovering it until you're trying to revise for the exam!
- Bring to tutorials/problems classes.
- It is astonishing how many students turn up for a problems class on, say, binary star orbits without bringing their notes with them!
Unless you are super-conscientious and have already learned all the material of the lectures so far, how do you expect to be able to do problems without your notes and handouts?
The idea of problems classes and tutorials is that you learn to solve problems with your notes (and with help), so that come the exam you will be in a good position to solve problems without your notes (and without help).
Tutors may also spot problems with your notes that you didn't – for example, it may turn out that the reason you can't solve problem 2 is that you missed out a minus sign in a critical equation.
- Apply to problems on your own.
- Many lecturers hand out sheets of practice problems; in addition, the last three years' exam papers are available on the departmental website (and papers from earlier eras are stored in the Information Commons, but note that the further back you go the more likely it is that the course has changed significantly).
Try these problems: many students, especially in first year, find that the main difficulty that they have with the course is applying their factual knowledge to solving problems, and the more practice you get, the better you will become. If you think that a problem or a past exam question relates to the material you've just been taught, but you can't see how to use that material to solve the problem, talk to your tutor or the course lecturer.
Again, the sooner you do this after the lecture, the better: it means that when future lectures build on this material you will have a solid foundation for the new stuff.
- Note that full model answers to past exam questions are not available. There are a number of reasons for this:
- We want to encourage you to try the questions, not just look up the answer and think "oh yes, I could have done that" – which, come the exams, turns out not to be true.
- The model answers we provide to examiners' meetings and the external examiners are intended for other academics, not students, and therefore are often quite abbreviated. This is difficult for students to follow, and may also lull you into a false sense of security (the fact that the lecturer's mark scheme does not, for example, define all the symbols in a derivation doesn't mean that you'd get away with that in an exam).
- In descriptive questions, there may in fact be no specific "right answer". The model answer often consists of a list of points that the student might make, with a note saying something like "One mark per properly explained point. Students must include the basic definition for full marks." This is perfectly adequate as a marking guide, but not much help to a student.
In recent years, numerical answers have been made available for those questions that actually have numerical answers.
This is useful for checking your answer to a question that you could do (if you've got the right numerical answer, you've probably done the right thing), but not much help if you didn't know where to start.
And many papers, such as PHY111 and PHY106, don't really have very many questions with numerical answers.
- The recommended solution to this impasse is to try the question, and then show your completed answer – or your answer up to the point at which you got stuck! – to your tutor or the lecturer.
He will then either tell you it was fine, or explain to you where you went wrong, or where you would have lost marks through failure to explain yourself clearly, include enough detail, or whatever.
Although this takes a bit more effort on your part (and on the lecturer's part too, please note – we're not refusing to give you model answers because we're lazy: it would in fact be easier for us to do that than it is to go over your efforts individually), it is much more valuable as a learning tool than just looking at a model answer.
support for students with disabilities
If you have a disability such as dyslexia, dyspraxia, or hearing or visual impairment, you may find it difficult or impossible to take notes during lectures.
Do not despair – help is at hand!
The University's Disability and Dyslexia Support Service provides various forms of support for students with disabilities, including note-takers.
If you think you might need such support, contact them as soon as possible so it can be organised.
(They also provide support for students with temporary disabilities – if you're right-handed and you've just broken your right wrist, give them a call.)
Note that your note-taker probably won't be a physics student, so s/he may not actually understand the notes s/he is taking. Hence it is especially important that you read over and review the notes that have been taken for you, to make sure that nothing has been miscopied or misunderstood.
(If you're not a physicist, copying down a complicated equation is like trying to copy Chinese characters if you're not Chinese – you'll do your best, but the result may not make any sense when read back. If you don't know what you're looking at, confusing α and a, or ξ and ζ, or h and ℏ, is very easy indeed, and may turn a sensible equation into gibberish.)
summary
- Learning to take effective lecture notes is an important part of your development as a university student.
Taking lecture notes will help you focus on the lectures, aid your understanding and enable you to spot problems as they arise, and provide you with an invaluable revision aid later.
- Many note-taking systems have been devised, all with their advantages and disadvantages.
Different systems will suit different people, and indeed the same person may want to use different styles for different courses. Feel free to experiment.
Choose a system that works for you.
- Just taking notes is not enough. Read over your notes, revise them in the light of later knowledge, and ask questions if you don't understand.
- Use your notes (and any handout material, associated website, etc.).
Make sure you can apply your knowledge to the solution of problems or to practical applications. There's no such thing as too much practice!
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