![]() ![]() To start, you’ll need to outline the main topics from the material. Now, it’s time to put these materials to use. Deep focus requires the right study space – try your best to create and maintain the right environment for yourself. Try to find a comfortable and quiet working space and free yourself from distractions. However, if you’re taking outline notes for an online course, you have more options. If you’re taking notes during a lecture, you don’t have much choice in this regard. Once again, any pen or pencil will do the job just fine (although, personally, I’m picky about pencils and prefer the Blackwing 602). If you use individual notebook papers for your notes, get a ring binder to hold all the papers together. Personally, I find spiral notebooks to be the most comfortable to use (if you’re looking for one, Mead’s spiral notebooks are affordable and high quality). To use the outline note-taking method, you’ll need the following: But here’s a quick rundown, just in case. The outline method does not require an expensive set of tools chances are you already have all the materials you need. Strategic use of these symbols helps reduce the content even further, thus resulting in short but information-rich notes that are easy to review before an exam. The indents are usually created with bullet points, dashes, numbers, or arrows. On the other hand, if it’s on the far-left side, it’s a major topic of importance with many smaller components. If it’s on the far-right side, it’s a smaller subtopic or fact. All further details are added with more indentation.ĭeveloping content outlines like this creates a logical structure for the notes where the level of information importance is demonstrated by its horizontal positioning in the document.Any supporting thoughts or facts are added with another indent to the right of the subtopics.The subtopics are added with an indent to the right of the main topics.The main topics are recorded on the left side of the document.Put simply, the outline method works with the following key characteristics: Through indentation and space relationships, outlining provides students with a clear hierarchy of information. Outlining is a major component of the system I use, and I’ll be covering this personal note-taking system in a future article. I am aware of the vast benefits of writing longhand – but I have my own personalized system that works wonders for me. However, instead of taking my notes in longhand (with a physical pen and paper), I take mine in a digital format. It’s a system that can sometimes be outshined by the matrix note-taking method, but both methods have their rightful place among the best.Īs a fully online learner, I use a variation of the outline method myself on a daily basis. This shows that unlike the Cornell note-taking method (for which research results have been mixed), the outline method of note-taking is an effective and science-backed method of taking notes. While conventional note-takers manage to record up to 30% of lecture materials, outline and matrix note-takers can record approximately 40%. It has been shown through research that outline note-takers record significantly more information from online lectures than conventional note-takers. Reduce your notes without having to rewrite them.Turn the main points of the content into study questions. ![]() Having a clear outline format for your notes helps you to: This means that besides recording lecture content, the outlining system also allows students to record the relationships between bits of information. What’s unique about the outline method is that it’s hierarchical by nature. ![]() But that’s a topic for another time (if you want more of Kiewra’s thinking, he builds on these ideas in his recent book on studying in college). Kiewra was also one of the first researchers to discover that simply handing out detailed notes to students post-lecture can achieve remarkable results. This helps with global coherence and knowledge retention as all your notes are systematized into topics. The second advantage of the outline method is that the act of outlining your topics and subtopics makes information retrieval easier and helps you build internal connections. This, in turn, facilitates local coherence. The first benefit of outlining is that the outline structure makes superordinate-subordinate relations within topics apparent. In his 1995 study, he described the two most significant benefits of outline note-taking – I’ll be paraphrasing here, but hopefully, I’ll get the gist of his points across. Between 19, he wrote over 20 research papers on note-taking, many of which used the outline method as a central point. Kiewra from the University of Nebraska is perhaps the best researcher to listen to when analyzing the outline method of note-taking. ![]()
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