The Cornell Method (Perfect Class Notes)

The Cornell Method

The strength of this method is the page layout. To make your own Cornell Notes, start by dividing the page into 3 main sections:

At the top of the page you write down the name of the course, meeting or seminar together with the date and the subject.

The left portion should be around 7 cm wide and is called the Cue / Questions / Keyword Column. This is where you’ll put your subheadings, all of which should be written as questions.

In the larger column on the right, also called the note-taking column, write your notes in the usual manner.

How to work with this method

The Cornell format provides the perfect opportunity for following through with the 5 R's of Note-Taking :

Record: During the lecture, Record legibly in the Note Taking Area as many meaningful facts and ideas as you can.

Reduce: As soon as possible, summarize these facts and ideas concisely in the Cue Column. Summarizing clarifies meanings and relationships, reinforces continuity, and strengthens memory.

Recite: Cover the Note-taking area using only your jotting in the cue column, repeat over the facts and ideas of the lecture as completely as you can, not mechanically, but in your own words. You may then verify what you have said.

Reflect: Draw out opinions from your notes and use them as a starting point for your own reflections on the course and how it relates to your other courses. Reflection will help prevent ideas from being forgotten.

Review: Spend 10 minutes every day in quick review of your notes and you will retain most of what you have learned.

Key Advantages

Having a special type of structure that you can rely on can feel more like home when you open your notes a few days after writing them. You already know where things are, you just have to look at the right zones on the page. This will save you a lot of time if you are studying subjects that requires taking a lot of notes. It also forces you to have organized content. Some of us are not especially tidy (and it is my case) and I found this method really powerful because it naturally makes my class notes organized.

One of the great assets of this method is that it comes with a routine that will greatly enhance your ability to learn. The three main pillars of learning being:

How deep the message is : As you might have already noticed, it's extremely hard to remember something that you dont understand. The same way around, once you master a skill, it means that you have a deeper understanding of how it works. In order to get that good understanding of what you want to learn, you have to maximize the depth of stimuli, which means you have to engage with the material and make it alive as much as possible. You can draw, build things, create graphs, talk about it with friends and family, or watch videos that deal with that subject.

Retrieval practice : Making the effort of recalling notions tells your brain that they are useful, and forces it to create connections in order to retrieve it faster and more easily every time you come back to them. The more you do this, the better you'll become at learning.

How often you recall it : It might sound a bit obvious, however this sentence has a double meaning. First it means that if you only go through the process I described above once, it will certainly not work. So you have to review the course material several times and test yourself even more in order to remember the notions perfectly. Thankfully you don't have to do this a million times to learn a lesson, the sweet spot is around 3-5 times for most people. The second meaning of this point is that the duration between every repetition matters. According to my own experience and a research paper I read, it appears that reducing the duration of the repetitions is the standard way to go (for example : during the first session, you take notes which is basically the class — let's say 2 hours — during the second session you write down your questions and ideas — this one can be 45 minutes — during the third session you summarize and evaluate yourself).

The routine that Cornell Method recommends is in favor of these 3 points, As it pushes you to feel those three zones in the page. If you do it correctly — that is, following a version of the five R's of note-taking — It is very likely that she will have a good understanding of the course material and learning it will be much easier as there is a protocol for it, Meaning that you don't just start with a blank page or your notepad, thinking : how do I learn this lesson?

Understanding

Understanding what you learn is really important as it will allow you to create connections with things that you already know, and this is one of the factors that greatly influence memory retention, which is how much of the course material you'll remember a certain period of time after reviewing it. This method is based on 3 things you'll do about your class notes:

Taking notes during the class : Obviously this one can't be skipped, but the way you do it can vary a lot depending on the note taking style you adopt : we will cover this in a future article where I will give you the best ways to take notes, properly speaking.

Questioning the material : The column on the left hand side of the page is all about writing questions, things to do, and reminders about your notes that you will write when you are reviewing your notes. Which, as we said earlier, implies that you build this routine of reviewing your class notes.

Summarizing the content: As we say : Well conceived, clearly said. Going through this phase of summarizing the content is not only a way for you to boil down the content to a minimum number of words, but also an excellent way to test your understanding. If you cannot explain something with a few simple words, you might not have understood it as much as you should have, or as much as you thought. To me there is no better way to see if notions are clear then explaining them. When you're taking care of this part, think about yourself in the future, who will read these simple explanations/bullet points and see the light bulb appear!

Conclusion

As always, I would recommend not to follow blindly a method that will supposedly make you succeed, but rather find what you love and what makes sense for you in this methods and use them as tools to enhance and refine your own strategy. In future articles, we'll see how we can mix and connect different workflows and methods to build a coherent learning system. Feel free to add your own touch, and share it with us!