[bayesian_horse]

In lectures, note-taking at all should be avoided, most of the time.

Most lectures cover material that is presented very clearly in accompanying materials, books or the internet. The idea I could do a better job than those authors while listening to the stuff for the first time is ludicrous. And at least for me it doesn't help recollection or focus to write notes while listening, and many students report they can take notes without the information passing through their brains. Other people swear they have to take notes to focus.

There are exceptions of course, for example if the information is new and any other available material is worthless.

[Hermitian909]

As another data point, I take notes almost almost solely for increased recollection, I've never really studied them. The physical act of writing down a phrase or idea emphasizes it in my memory to such a noticeable degree that if I lack writing utensils I will mime the action; the physical notes themselves are rarely useful once made. I find this also works in settings that are not live, I am able to work through textbooks significantly faster if I take notes while reading in a similar fashion to a lecture.

I get regular remarks from people who don't know me asking why I'm throwing away the page of notes I wrote down in a meeting - it's because I'll never look at them again. But now the important parts of that meeting will be crystal clear in my head for the next couple months instead of the next couple days.

[bayesian_horse]

Maybe you would do even better just imagining writing it down on paper or actively building mental representations.

But if it works well enough, why not? The act of writing notes may involve mental processing or not. If it's just a matter of concentration and focus, there might be better remedies.

[Hermitian909]

Imagining writing it down would keep me from actively building mental representations in most situations :)

The writing is semi-automatic and does not merely involve verbatim quotes from others. If today I were to attend a lecture or talk and something the speaker said prompted some visual insight I would immediately draw it as part of my note-taking process. The whole reason I began taking such copious notes, in fact, was the realization that if I didn't write these things down I often needed to have an insight two to three times for it to become a permanent part of my mental model of a problem space, rather than the once.

[Izkata]

No matter how good your mental discipline, it won't be as consistently good as writing down the notes. This is just another variation of point-and-call [0].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling

[Cederfjard]

>In lectures, note-taking at all should be avoided, most of the time.

That's a very strong statement that I guess is based on your own personal experience?

If I can provide my own subjective opinion and educated guess, I do agree that taking notes verbatim feels close to pointless. You need to take in what you're hearing and grok it before you jot down your summary. Then you can go revisit your notes later to practice, or even better try to recall without looking at them first, and then check to corroborate.

>The idea I could do a better job than those authors while listening to the stuff for the first time is ludicrous.

I don't think anyone has suggested this to be the case. Even though it doesn't work that way for you, the point of note-taking even when the information is available from other materials is to facilitate retention and understanding, not to produce superior source material. I do believe it is effective for this purpose, for most people.

All through my education, I never really bothered to listen to teachers and lecturers and basically never took notes. I just read course literature and tried to grok the main concepts, and it worked wonders for getting me through tests and exams. Longer term retention of what I learned was atrocious though. Now as an adult I take notes and study in a much more disciplined way, and it's so much more effective long term that it leaves me with a sense of regret that I didn't know or realize all this as a kid.

Just my two cents.

[bayesian_horse]

My strong statement is first of all based on the specific act of note taking in the specific situation of lectures for the specific goal of learning.

You seem to conflate taking no notes with not listening. If the only point of the note-taking is to ensure the listening and mental engagement, then I doubt that's the most effective way.

[Cederfjard]

The idea is that engaging with the material (i.e. breaking it down, summarizing it and putting it on paper) helps with retention compared to just taking it in and trying to understand it in your head. I can tell you don't believe in that, but that's what the argument is.

>You seem to conflate taking no notes with not listening. If the only point of the note-taking is to ensure the listening and mental engagement, then I doubt that's the most effective way.

I honestly can't see how you get this from my comment.

[leksak]

I wish lectures weren't really a thing in their current format. Why just reiterate what is already available in text and video? Have students consume the theoretical material beforehand and schedule Q&A's or practical application sessions or anything else where the interaction between lecturer and student may become something more dynamic.

[bayesian_horse]

Making students sit for hours in lectures still seems the most practical and efficient way to ensure they spend enough of their time learning something.

Expecting them to prepare the theory beforehand has not proven to be that practical. Lecturers who try this quickly learn to adjust their expectations downward, in my experience. And even then a lot of the "class" will be quite underprepared.

[leksak]

> Making students sit for hours in lectures still seems the most practical and efficient way to ensure they spend enough of their time learning something.

I don't believe the onus is on the educational institute to ensure that students learn anything when it comes to higher education.

The student is paying tuition or taking a student loan to be there, I think it should be reasonable to expect them to exercise their own responsibility and learn the source-material.

The fact that they do not might be indicative that they should be studying something else, and catering to them only exascerbates the issue rather than leading to a Darwinian solution.

[LoudogUno]

That’s a great point. I could see professors iteratively updating source material based on QA. Wasting less and less time students time each semester. Compiling, refining and polishing whatever it is they had to say.

[jay_kyburz]

Yes, this is what I came to the comments to say. For me, paying attention was much more important than trying to take notes. It's a shame this study didn't have a third group that didn't take notes at all.

[Drdrdrq]

This, so much! Whenever I could I avoided taking notes and instead copied them from classmates or studied from books.

[scarejunba]

Same here. I wonder if it's the courses we took. I did Mathematics and Computer Science. The only time I took notes it was a disaster. My notes were perfect, my recollection awful. I had to reread them to get any value.

The rest of the time I just sat in class and paid close attention, rarely noting down to look up some lemma or the other. Way better results. Instant recollection. I can still remember the Nullstellensatz vaguely and the room in which I first encountered it and where I was in it and that's almost a decade ago.

[Izkata]

I actually fall into a third bucket, at least when it came to math courses: I'd attempt to work ahead of the instructor during the lecture, instead of just writing notes or just listening.

Because of the way well-done math courses are structured, with topics building on each other, I was able to do this about half the time. Most importantly, any mistakes I made would be almost immediately corrected, so I never learned the material wrong, like if I'd waited until the homework.

[scarejunba]

Right. That’s Mathematics/CS in general, right? The lecture is usually driven by the students progressing the proof. That’s bucket one, I think. I know most of us used scratch work but it wasn’t notes. It’s more like swap space than general disk. I rarely looked at scratch space again, though I preemptively held all those books with me.

[bayesian_horse]

It's easy to copy formulas from a blackboard without mentally processing them.

[nieksand]

The exact opposite works for me.

Note taking massively helps me on both remembering and the level of attention I pay to the lecture itself. Without notes, my attention drifts and I might as well just be passively watching TV.

Like Hermitian909, I don't particularly care about the notes afterwards. They're sometimes handy for skimming over when prepping for an exam or reworking through an example of a half-understood concept, but for the most part I don't use them.

[Double_a_92]

> The idea I could do a better job than those authors while listening to the stuff for the first time is ludicrous.

Agree. I remember that I had one course that the prof couldn't really explain nicely and it seemed really hard. Then while preparing for the exam I actually read the book, and everything made sense and was quite easy.

[Mediterraneo10]

This is why as an undergraduate, I rarely went to a course's lectures, I just read the readings and then came in for the exam. In many fields, lecturers at the undergraduate level are capable of giving you no more information than you could find in the standard textbooks and handbooks.

[RegBarclay]

I tend to agree in general. I found that actively listening and paying attention to a lecturer and maybe taking a few sparse notes on some key points or things emphasized by the speaker worked fine. I advised my kids as they went off to college that showing up and paying attention were the most important things they could do.

[AlchemistCamp]

I think it really depends on the teacher. My abstract algebra teacher, for example, expected us to copy the blackboard every class and our notes to be our primary text.

[rb808]

Some people are very good at organizing and reading & working on the material before the lecture. This seems ideal, though I'd never been able to do that.

[smittywerben]

A teacher can only test on the topics they covered. I take notes of everything. I can tell the teacher what they have covered.

An ounce of analysis is worth a pound of law.