Notes That Work

Good notes are not a copy of the lecture or the textbook. They are a tool you build for one purpose: to help your future self understand, remember and test yourself on BIO 243. This chapter shows you how to take notes in lecture and while reading, how to combine them the way the syllabus asks, and how to turn them into maps, flow charts, drawings and self-tests.

What notes are really for

Ask a room of students why they take notes and most will say, "So I have something to study later." That is true, but it is only half the story. Notes do two jobs. The first job is to record: to capture information you might otherwise lose, like an example your instructor gave or a figure the lecture focused on. The second job is to transform: to make you process the material, by choosing what matters, putting it in your own words and connecting it to what you already know.

The second job is where most of the learning happens. A page of notes copied word for word from a slide records a lot but transforms almost nothing. A shorter page where you wrote "Osteoblasts build bone, osteoclasts break it down: blast builds, clast crashes" did both jobs at once. As you read this chapter, keep asking: Is this method making me think, or just making me write?

Lecture notes and reading notes are different

In BIO 243 you will build two kinds of notes, and they have different strengths.

Reading notes

Reading notes come from the OpenStax textbook, ideally before the lecture on that topic. You make them at your own pace, so they can be careful and complete. They are the place for definitions, the details of a process, and your vocabulary list with word roots (Chapter 3). Their weakness is that they do not tell you what your instructor thinks is most important, and they can easily become a long, flat copy of the book.

Lecture notes

Lecture notes capture what happens in class: what your instructor emphasizes, the examples and clinical stories they use, the connections they draw between topics, and the questions other students ask. They are fast and messy by nature, because you cannot pause a lecture. Their weakness is that they have gaps. You will miss words, mishear terms and fall behind during a fast stretch.

Tips for taking lecture notes

• Do not try to write everything. You cannot keep up, and trying makes you stop thinking. Capture key terms, main ideas, examples and anything your instructor repeats, draws or slows down for.
• Leave space. Skip lines and leave a wide margin. You will fill those gaps later.
• Mark confusion right away. Put a "?" next to anything that did not make sense. That mark becomes a question for your reconcile session, for SI or for student hours.
• Use the slides if they are posted. If your instructor shares slides before class, download them and write your notes on or beside them, so you can listen instead of copying.
• Write down the examples. When your instructor says something like "Think about what happens when you get a paper cut," write the example down. Clinical examples are often the bridge between a term and an exam question.

The reconcile-and-rewrite routine

Your BIO 243 syllabus asks you to rewrite and reconcile your notes from reading and lecture. This is one of the most valuable habits you can build in the course. "Reconcile" means to bring two things into agreement. You lay your reading notes and lecture notes side by side, find where they match, where they differ and where each has gaps, and then write one clean, combined version in your own words.

Why does this work so well? Because it forces exactly the kind of thinking that builds memory. You have to decide what matters. You have to explain things in your own words. You have to notice and fix what you do not understand. And you see the material a second and third time, spaced out from the first, which helps it last.

How to do it, step by step

1. Do it soon. Aim for the same day as lecture, or within a day. The lecture is still fresh, so you can fill in gaps from memory.
2. Lay both sets side by side. Open your reading notes and your lecture notes, plus the OpenStax section.
3. Mark three things. Put a check where they agree. Circle anything in one set that is missing from the other. Find every "?" you wrote in lecture.
4. Fix the "?" marks. Use OpenStax to answer them. If you cannot, write the question on a separate list to bring to SI, CircleIn or student hours.
5. Rewrite one clean page. Close your notes for a moment and try to write the main ideas from memory first. Then open them and fill in what you missed. Use your own words, short sentences, and drawings or flow charts where they help.
6. Add questions. In the margin, write questions that the page answers. These become your self-test later.

A full reconcile session for one lecture usually takes 30 to 45 minutes. That is why Chapter 2 suggested placing a study block soon after each BIO 243 lecture. This is what that block is for.

Cornell-style notes: build the questions in

One of the best formats for your rewritten page is the Cornell system, developed by Walter Pauk at Cornell University and still taught in study-skills courses (Pauk & Owens, 2014). The page is divided into three parts:

• A wide notes column on the right for your main notes.
• A narrow cue column on the left, where you write questions or key words that match each part of the notes.
• A summary strip across the bottom, where you write two or three sentences that pull the whole page together.

The real power of Cornell notes is the cue column. When you study later, fold the page or cover the notes column with a sheet of paper. Read each cue question and answer it out loud from memory. Then uncover the notes and check. Your notes have just become a self-test, with no extra work. The summary strip matters too. Writing two sentences that capture the whole page forces you to find the big idea, which is exactly what you need to answer application questions.

Concept maps: show how ideas connect

A&P is full of categories inside categories. There are four types of tissue, each with several subtypes, each with its own structure, location and function. A list is a poor way to see all of that at once. A concept map is better. It puts each idea in a box or bubble and connects the boxes with lines that are labeled with a short phrase, such as "includes," "lines," or "is made of." Those link labels are what make it a concept map instead of just a doodle. They force you to state exactly how two ideas are related.

The key: build it from memory

Concept maps have good research support. A review of many studies found that students who studied with concept maps tended to remember more than students who studied with lists, outlines or text alone (Nesbit & Adesope, 2006). But there is an important twist. In one well-known experiment, students who built a concept map while looking at a science text did worse on a later test than students who practiced recalling the text from memory (Karpicke & Blunt, 2011). The lesson is not that maps are bad. It is that a map you copy is weak, and a map you build from memory is strong. Close the book, draw what you can, then open the book and add what you missed in a different color. The gaps you fill in are exactly what you need to study.

Flow charts: turn processes into steps

Your syllabus asks you to draw processes as flow charts, and there is a good reason. Physiology is full of processes: chains of events where each step causes the next. Paragraphs hide that structure. A flow chart shows it. Each box is one event, and each arrow means "which causes" or "which leads to."

Here is how to build one. First, list the steps in order on scrap paper. Then put each step in a box, using as few words as you can. Connect the boxes with arrows. Finally, test the chart by reading it aloud with the word "because" between each pair of boxes. If a "because" does not make sense, a step is missing or out of order.

Drawing and labeling

You do not have to be an artist to learn A&P by drawing. Research on drawing and memory has found that drawing something tends to help people remember it better than writing it down, likely because drawing makes you think about what it looks like, what it means and how to show it, all at once (Fernandes et al., 2018). In BIO 243, simple sketches are enough: a neuron as a blob with branches and one long tail, a sarcomere as a row of lines between two Z discs, the layers of the skin as stacked bands.

The best drawing practice works the same way as the best concept maps. First, look at the OpenStax figure and study it. Then put it away and draw it from memory, with labels. Then compare and fix what you missed. Repeat a day or two later. Chapter 7 goes deeper on how to learn structures and processes by drawing from memory, and how to use it for lab practicals.

Laptop, tablet or paper?

You may have heard that handwritten notes are always better than typed ones. That idea comes largely from a famous study in which students who took notes on laptops tended to copy lectures word for word and did worse on some conceptual questions than students who wrote by hand (Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014). The study got a lot of attention. But later research has been more mixed. A replication that also added new conditions found the handwriting advantage was smaller and less consistent than first reported (Morehead et al., 2019), and a direct replication with a combined look at similar studies did not find a clear overall advantage for longhand (Urry et al., 2021).

So what should you do? Here is the honest summary:

• The tool matters less than what you do with it. Copying word for word is weak on any device. Choosing, summarizing and connecting ideas is strong on any device.
• Drawing is easier by hand or with a stylus. A&P has a lot of diagrams and flow charts, which is a real point in favor of paper or a tablet with a pen.
• Distraction is the bigger danger. In one study, students who multitasked on laptops during a lecture learned less, and so did students sitting nearby who could see their screens (Sana et al., 2013). If you use a laptop, close every tab and app that is not your notes.
• Use what you will actually reconcile. The best notes are the ones you return to the same day.

Turning notes into self-test material

Your notes reach their full value when you use them to test yourself, not just to reread. Once you have a reconciled page, you can turn it into practice in several ways:

• Cue questions. Cover the notes column and answer the cue column out loud.
• Flashcards. Turn each key term into a card with the term on one side and your own definition and an example on the other. CircleIn is a good place to build them, and Chapter 6 explains how to use flashcards the right way.
• Blank diagrams. Redraw a figure without labels and fill them in from memory.
• Flow chart rebuilds. Write the first and last box of a process and fill in the middle from memory.
• Your own exam questions. The syllabus suggests writing your own questions. Write two multiple-choice questions per lecture, with believable wrong answers. Writing good wrong answers forces you to understand the common mix-ups.

When you share notes or flashcards in CircleIn, remember that CircleIn is graded work. What you post should be your own.