Anytime a teacher writes on the board we are often bombarded with the question “Do we have to write this down?”. It is very hard not to roll your eyes when you hear this; let face it, we don’t write things on the board for our own benefit. But I can’t blame students for thinking that copying notes is a waste of time. Copying notes mean nothing if you don’t do anything with them. Students need to interact with the notes they make. They need the notes to be made in a style they can relate to and make sense of and has a purpose for what they see as learning something relevant.
Becoming an independent note-taker is an essential skill for students that helps to transform them from a student that regurgitates information to a student that thinks beyond the page and engages with their learning.
Yes, it takes time.
No, not all students like it ... straight away.
Efficient note-taking takes practice but it allows the student to engage with their notes several times before the notes are completed and this repetition of going over the notes means the information has more of a chance of being remembered.
The AVID way of taking notes is called Cornell Note-taking. Notice the term “note-taking” – it is not referred to as “note-copying”. Cornell notes provide the scaffold for students to take, make, interact and reflect with their notes. The emphasis is on the students engaging with their notes in ways that make the notes their own – not simply copying them from the board and never referring to them again.
This is what Cornell Notes looks like – you can use printed off, pre-planned paper, but mostly, you can make your own by having students draw up the scaffold in their workbooks. My AVID class has this down to a 10-second process.
Cornell notes are designed so that students are taking notes about any new information they are learning. There are four parts to this process:
- Note Taking
- Note Making
- Note Interacting
- Note-reflecting
Taking Notes
Filling in the information at the top of the paper allows the students work to be organised. Information such as date, class, topic, objective creates an easy reference tool and makes it easy to refer back to information at a later stage. The Essential Question basically addresses what the aim of the lesson and what students are going to learn in this lesson. It addresses the question “what are these notes going to tell me when I finish writing them?”. It is usually given to the students by the teacher.
The notes section is where students keep their own notes that they have taken in class – from anything - reading a textbook, listening to a lecture from a teacher, watching a video, doing a science experiment.They can use their preferred style and organisation. They write their notes in this section anyway they want to, anyway that they know that they are going to remember them and know why they wrote them, so there is no particular form or fashion. Students should be encouraged to take notes the way they like to take notes.
Making Notes
Making notes clearer so that they make sense to the student.Students need to spend time going back over the notes they have taken to make their notes usable. They can use several different methods to make their notes usable. They might underline key information, they might fill in gaps with a partner - what did they write down that the other didn’t or vice versa – they might look for chunks of notes, write corresponding questions in the questions column, make their own study questions about the information.
Note Interacting
This part of the process allows students to create questions and summaries from their notes. It is about the studying of the student’s notes. They will answer each question that they have written in the questions column to compose a summary that helps to answer those questions in the summary section of the page. These completed notes become a learning tool and study reference to come back to when revising the topic.
Note Reflecting
Students should take the time to consider how the notes could be better – are there things the student still doesn’t understand? Where is the point of confusion? Students need to spend time going back over their notes to make their notes better. This might still be happening after they have completed a topic or an assessment task. If students have been given feedback on their notes the reflection process gives them a chance to address that feedback and see how they can improve on the notes they have taken. Students also need to be given time to reflect on how their notes have prepared them for the topic or the assessment. If they have done well in a topic or assessment, their interaction with their notes has been sufficient. If they haven’t done as well as they would like, then reflection on the engagement with the note-taking process will be necessary.
Copying notes from the board do not allow time for students to remember information. There is an art to remembering information and it is based on a study by Psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus called The Rate of Forgetting. His research showed that the very first day that you learn some new information, you are going to retain about 100% of that information. On day 2, if you spend 10 minutes on that information you will retain most of that information. On day 7, doing that same amount of revision, you will retain a high amount of the information. Even a month later, if you spend the same amount of time, assuming that you’ve spent 10 minutes each day revising the same information, you will have a high percentage of retained information. So consistent revision is essential to retaining information. Keeping well-organised notes bodes well for when you are completing an assessment task a couple of weeks after you’ve originally learned the information – making efficient and organised note-taking is very important.
“How can Cornell Notes make grades better?”
This video is from the AVID online modules and addresses this essential question.
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