Are good note takers usually good comprehenders?

[Stephen Tashi]

A recent thread ( https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/how-to-take-notes-for-physics-and-math.1001682/ ) makes me wonder about the connection between good note takers and good (rapid) comprehenders.

I was never able to take good notes in math lectures if I was struggling to comprehend the material. Conceivably, a person could possesses note taking as a stenographic skill - independently of being able to interpret the content of the notes. So advice on note taking could fall into two categories. One category would deal with the purely stenographic aspects. The other category would uphold the higher ideals of education and advise about how to combine comprehension with note taking.

 

[TeethWhitener]

I doubt it’s a one body problem. It’s very difficult to take good notes on poorly presented material.

 

[anorlunda]

I was also bad at note taking. The reason is poor penmanship skills. I find that my writing (cursive or block print) is illegible unless I focus intensely on controlling my hand motions. That focus means that I have to shut out hearing what is being said. So I can make notes, or pay attention but not both.

With a keyboard however, I have no trouble. But in the past use of a keyboard device was impossible in most circumstances, and even today it is frowned on in many circumstances. In that respect, I find that Zoom meetings during the pandemic work better for me because I can use my keyboard without the others being aware of it.

The technical term is Dysgraphia .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgraphia
The number of students with dysgraphia may increase from 4 percent of students in primary grades, due to the overall difficulty of handwriting, and up to 20 percent in middle school because written compositions become more complex.

There is very little recognition of, or accommodations made for this problem.

 

[kuruman]

I had a kid in my introductory quantum mechanics class who brought in his laptop and took notes directly into LaTeX including Hamiltonians expressed as equations or matrices. His notes were beautiful but his comprehension (as I discovered after the first hourly exam) was marginal. Of course, this is only one anecdotal example.

 

[vela]

I was an absolutely horrible note taker. During the second quarter in college, I took notes in physics but later realized I never referred to them. So one day, I made a point of looking at my notes and found I couldn't understand them. I decided to stop taking notes as it was just a waste of paper and ink. I got by fine with listening in lecture and reading the textbook. This was the case with most engineering, physics, and math courses until I got to grad school. I did take notes when I took real analysis and abstract algebra as the professor didn't assign a textbook and his lectures were really good.

My note-taking was bad because I would tend not to write down things that made sense to me, figuring I could reconstruct the reasoning on my own later. This was a disaster when I took a bio class for fun. The lectures were interesting and made sense to me, but the material was unfamiliar enough that I didn't have the foundational knowledge needed to successfully reproduce the reasoning. (Thank god for the paid note-taker for the class!)

 

[kuruman]

My undergraduate notes were practically worthless to me too. When I got t grad school I realized that it was more important to write down the professor's justifications and explanations rather than the equations that can also be found in the book. To achieve that goal, I got into the habit of reading the book before going to class even if I didn't understand everything just to see what's in there. It helped a lot.

By far, the best class I had in grad school was second-semester E&M (second half of Jackson). Nobody took any notes because it was that kind of class. The professor would sit behind his table and start flipping the pages of the appropriate section in Jackson. He would pause at some point and ask, "Mr. Jones, what do you think Jackson has in mind when he says on page 245, it obviously follows that ... ?" That was his teaching style which upset everybody at first. Quickly though, our pride as physics graduate students took over, we formed study groups and we took Jackson apart sentence by sentence trying to guess in advance what questions might be coming our way in class. Needless to say, we all learned a lot. The only notes we kept were to ourselves in preparation for the professor's questions. I have always wanted to emulate this teaching style but I never tried. Perhaps I didn't have the nerve to pull it off or I didn't believe that my students would rise to the occasion or a mix of both.

 

[Office_Shredder]

I tried to write down everything that was said in a lecture. The notes were barely legible, but were very complete. The less I understood what was going on the more I focused on just getting anything down on the paper so I could review it later. I found this to be fairly successful for myself.

 

[Frabjous]

There are also the people who take their chicken scratchings and rewrite them into something comprehensible after class while they still remember what happened (they can also using reading material to clear up the bad areas).

 

[MidgetDwarf]

Not necessarily. I only took notes for 5 courses out of all of my courses (BS in Math). I mainly tried working through the section/chapter before the lecture, and wrote in the margins of my textbook if the teacher offered insight I did not know. I always felt lecture was a waste of time. However, I did take great advantage of office hours and worked on problems that were not assigned/had difficulty.
The only exception was Intro Modern Algebra (group theory), EM (both intro and upper division), Graph Theory, and Topology. Where the instructors offered great insights, did not follow assigned book, and simplified advanced topics, so that the general student could walk out with understanding. I noticed that my classmates who were great note takers, just memorized instead of understanding. So when an instructor got creative with the test questions, they would do poorly. So maybe good note taking has a correlation with good grades, but not necessarily understanding.

 

[George Jones]

I also was terrible at taking notes during lectures. I preferred to pay close attention during lectures, and to read texts outside of lectures. Glad there were no smart phones in my day to distract me during lectures.

 

[nucl34rgg]

The entire point of note taking is that it is to help the person remember. What we call a "good note taker" is simply someone with good handwriting or typing skills. It's probably the people that never take any notes but still do well that have the best comprehension since it means they don't need any memory help.

 

[Amrator]

As I mentioned in that thread, I find that writing notes during lectures is actually detrimental to my being able to follow along with the instructor. I just can't multitask to save my life. Therefore, I don't really write notes during lectures. I only write down the instructor's sample problems/solutions and any key points they make that are not in the textbook. To be honest, unless the professor is an exceptionally good teacher, lectures don't even help me to begin with. I've always been a book guy.

 

[Mayhem]

Note taking is overrated. Learn through practice and repetition and the concepts will have a far longer half life in your memory. All note taking does is make you reliant on your notes.