By: Kendall Upton
Professional insights: Kira L. Carbonneau
If you’re a student, physician, nurse, healthcare administrator or any other allied health professional, chances are you’ll end up attending and participating in a healthcare lecture or seminar at some point in your career. These educational events are a great opportunity to network with other professionals in your field and expand your knowledge and skills. Plus, they are a popular way of accruing continuing education (CE) units which many healthcare professionals are required to complete to maintain their license.
No matter your reason for attending a live or online seminar, a little preparation can go a long way. Consider some of these tried-and-true note-taking strategies so that you can get the most out of your experience.
Key takeways
- Sometimes taking notes can distract from a lecture. If possible, see if you can take notes afterwards to consolidate what you learned.
- When you do take notes, summarize information instead of writing things down verbatim.
- Writing by hand could increase retention compared to typing notes on a computer.
- Try out different kinds of notes like concept maps, diagrams and other visual representations, and see what works best for you.
How to take notes that work for you, not against you
Whatever professional or academic context you may be in that tempts you to take notes, you might want to first ask yourself whether taking notes at all is the best choice.
“Note-taking is tricky. What happens when you open too many windows on your computer, your computer freezes right? Or you get the spinning wheel of death because you put your computer into cognitive overload. That happens when you’re doing note-taking. We as humans cannot multitask, so there is definitely a bottleneck of information that goes into working memory [when you take notes],” said Kira Carbonneau, PhD, Associate Professor and Department Chair for Kinesiology and Educational Psychology at Washington State University.
Contrary as it may sound, Carbonneau actually encourages people not to take notes during a lecture, especially since they’re often recorded and shared with the participants later. This is even more common in a lot of undergraduate classes nowadays, but it applies to professional settings as well.
“Every time you take a note, your brain has to focus on what you’re doing like spelling words correctly, even if you’re scribbling. Or you end up taking notes so inefficiently because you’re still trying to [pay attention] that when you look at your notes later on, they mean nothing to you.”
Instead, Carbonneau said it may be more helpful to take notes after a lecture and engage in consolidation based on what you remember.
“Consolidation is writing out everything that’s pertinent for that lecture. Hopefully your instructor is engaging in good teaching strategies and they give you the highlights of what needs to be done or they’ve given you a PowerPoint, and then you can take notes after lecture of what you can recall.”
When you do decide to take notes, there are still a few best practices to keep in mind to maximize your learning potential.
Summarize, don’t transcribe
Perhaps one of the most obvious but detrimental pitfalls when it comes to note-taking is copying information word for word from a lecture or text. Instead, the most helpful kinds of notes are ones that summarize the essential information.
In a 1979 study, researchers Bretzing and Kulhavy split students into several groups that used different note-taking strategies like summarization, taking notes verbatim or taking no notes at all. They read an article, used their assigned strategy and then took a test on the article at a later time. Students whose notes were verbatim from the material actually didn’t perform any better than the group who didn’t take any notes.
This gets at a central tenet of effective note-taking. Whether you are listening to a lecture or reading a text, you should take notes that put the ideas in your own words. This forces your brain to actually process the information at hand, whereas simply copying information really doesn’t require any depth of thought.
Take notes by hand
In an increasingly digital world, typing notes on a laptop or other device has become much more common in the academic world and beyond. Research continues to demonstrate, however, that writing notes by hand may be a more effective approach to note-taking when it comes to long term learning.
One reason for this is that researchers found that note-takers who used a laptop were more likely to type out what the lecturer said verbatim, which unfortunately sacrifices critical thinking about the content itself.
Even if you’re writing notes using a digital pen on a tablet, that works too—one study showed that participants who took notes using a digital pen and those who used a regular pen and paper both outperformed the group who took notes on a keyboard. When possible, try to avoid typing out notes altogether.
Ditch the highlighter
Highlighting important words, phrases or ideas in a text has been a commonplace note-taking strategy and study tactic for a long time, but many educational psychologists are now suggesting that highlighting isn’t as helpful as we may think. When we highlight items in a text, we just call attention to specific pieces of information without making any actual connections between them. Plus, we often highlight things that are already highlighted in some way (bolded words, for example), which doesn’t add anything of value.
“Some of the habits that we’ve been trained to do—highlighting important information, note-taking—those aren’t really effective,” Carbonneau said.
If you’re a healthcare professional at a seminar and your instinct is to highlight an accompanying text in front of your or your own notes, it may be wise to just put the highlighter down altogether.
Create notes in different formats
Notes don’t always have to take the form of bullet points of text. Concept maps, for example, are a highly effective method of developing critical thinking skills. Sometimes called a web diagram, they are a visual representation of the relationships and connections between ideas and information.
But concept maps are only the tip of the iceberg.
“It can be, depending on the content, Venn diagrams, pros and cons lists. Is it a philosophy class and you need to understand two different perspectives or three different perspectives on a similar concept? Is it a chemistry class and you know that there’s formulas and conceptual and procedural knowledge that needs to be there? So there are different visual representations that you should make after,” Carbonneau said.
Do what works for you
Some learning strategies simply work better for some people than others. Figure out what works for you and stick to it. When it comes to note-taking, Carbonneau said it’s all about creating or reproducing what you know in the way that makes sense to you.
“This is something I force upon students in my embodied cognition class, I force them to make a representation afterwards, and I had people do artwork and it made sense to them, and they were able to translate it. I think that’s the one thing that we in education fail to do sometimes, is to really acknowledge different ways of knowing, and so when we see something that doesn’t represent the way we understand it, we often mark it as inconsistent.”
Though we may have certain preferences for what kind of learning strategies work best for us, Carbonneau said that she does not want people to think of themselves within the framework of “multiple intelligences,” which is the idea that some people are “visual learners” or “kinesthetic learners,” for example.
“All those theories have no empirical evidence,” she said. “I would say the preferences are even more nuanced. Do I engage in class discussion, or do I need to sit back and listen? Do I do a concept map versus do I write a paragraph? That’s the level of preferences I’m talking about.”
Parting words
Even though note-taking is still standard practice and taught from a young age, many educational psychologists argue that note-taking can sometimes be detrimental to our learning. If you are attending a healthcare seminar (or a college class, or any other kind of lecture) that is being recorded and shared afterwards, try to resist the urge to take notes and just listen to the information. Then consolidate what you’ve learned into notes afterwards, using the lecture recording or presentation slides as needed. Utilizing other note-taking best practices alongside this strategy can help maximize your learning potential.
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