I’ve mentioned before that I’m a big fan of Cornell notes. This has become a standard expectation of all our A level Psychology students and they are set this as a homework for most lessons/topics. There has been plenty written about the form and rationale of Cornell notes – some useful resources here and here. The Cornell system is a relatively straightforward system to understand, but the devil is in the detail. Like most things in teaching, if something is to work then it needs to be done properly, and if something is going to be done properly then it needs a bit of thought and planning. I have heard teachers say that they get their students to do Cornell notes, but they aren’t particularly effective; similarly I have taught many students who don’t use them properly and then start to refuse to do them. It’s worth noting here that using the Cornell system won’t teach students how to actually take notes effectively – selecting key ideas and summarising in an efficient manner; David Rodger-Goodwin (@Mrgoodwin23) has written an excellent post on this here. Unless you’re working with students who are already skilled in note-taking (ie likely at least undergraduate level) then perhaps the Cornell system is best viewed as an approach that helps them impose further organisation on the information that increases the likelihood of them learning it. This is why I (currently) only use them for consolidation; students are expected to make them using their class notes, booklets, lesson slides and textbook and a significant part of the challenge is selecting the most pertinent information from all these sources and condensing appropriately. This is a very different beast to using them to take notes ‘live’ as in a lesson or watching a video.
In this post I want to consider some of the pitfalls – where students don’t use them effectively, and how to remedy that. I think the most important issue here is that making good notes is a means to improve understanding and retention of information. The process is much more important than the end product. Where this goes wrong, typically, is that students (and some teachers) focus on making sure they produce something that looks like a decent set of Cornell notes, rather than giving due time and effort to the process which gets them there. Given that there are four different sections on a page of Cornell notes, I’m going to consider each one in turn. I’m using Psychology examples here, but I think the principles should apply pretty well to most subjects.
In case anyone isn’t familiar with the layout, here is an example:
Section A is for the title, including ‘organisational’ information such as what unit, subtopic or exam paper.
Section B is for the main body of information. This should contain bullet points summarising the main ideas of the text. These can be arranged into paragraphs to distinguish different sections of the text.
Section C is for summarising key ideas or themes from each section of section B, usually with just a couple of words or a question for each ‘cue’.
Section D is completed last and is for a short, prose (full sentence) summary of the main ideas and concepts covered in the notes.
Section A: Title
Students should complete this first, and it’s surprising how many of them don’t do it, or at least don’t really think about what needs to go in here. A lot has been written about ensuring students see how what they’re learning fits in the wider context – they need this to develop sophisticated schemas for complex knowledge; Cornell notes can facilitate this. I emphasise that the title section should contain all the organisational cues to tell them how this knowledge fits with what they have learned elsewhere, and to help them see what goes where. On a different level, I get them to imagine their folder breaking, scattering loose sheets of paper around the room. How much harder to put it all back in the right place if they’re not titled properly! So if I’m teaching, for example, the use of anger management as a treatment for offenders, some students might have a title section that looks like this:
| Mr Cline | Anger Management | 11/04/21 |
This is unhelpful, as that doesn’t provide them the cues they need – for example, they won’t see an exam paper helpfully labelled Mr Cline’s section! Instead, I’ll model my heading which would look like this:
| Paper 2 Criminal | Treatments for Offenders: Cognitive → Anger Management | 11/04/21 |
This is far more useful as it tells them which unit (paper 2), subsection (Criminal), topic area (treatments for offenders), subtopic (cognitive treatments). Knowing all of this, alongside the actual details of anger management means students have a much better understanding of when and where they might need this knowledge, and also what other knowledge they have learned might be relevant that they could draw upon (ie they will have another section titled Treatments for Offenders: Biological → Diet which could therefore be used for comparison).
Section B: Main body of notes
This section is where the core knowledge needs to be distilled. A common issue here is that students either write too little or too much; getting the balance is tricky. For those that write too little, it’s usually either due to laziness, poor modelling of expectations from the teacher, or a misunderstanding of the purpose, or some combination of all three. Some students may feel that brevity is key here, putting only broad ideas and a few key terms; research (eg Marzano, 2001) suggests that students who make more detailed notes actually perform better than those who don’t. At the other end of the scale an issue is that students (and teachers) can conflate volume with detail and so write in a level of detail that is unhelpful as there is little distillation of information going on, or any attempt to transform that information thereby often bypassing much meaningful cognitive processing. Teaching students to make effective use of shorthand and symbols is useful here so that they don’t simply passively copy information from one source to another.
Section C: Summary keywords & questions
This is where I find students get it wrong the most and miss the point of the system. For this to work, whatever they put in the left hand column should come as a result of thinking about what they’ve put in the notes section (B). You can use keywords or questions but the important idea is that these should act as cues for them to be able to remember the detailed content in the main body. I prefer questions because I think it takes more cognitive effort to generate a question than simply selecting a keyword, and feels more useful further down the line for retrieval practice (if they make flashcards then they can use the questions from their Cornell notes as a starting point). However, what many students actually appear to do is one of two things: 1) they simply copy subheadings from their notes section (B) into column C or 2) they write the subheadings in here first before they start making their notes. Neither of these means that they are actually doing the mental heavy lifting that is intended, and therefore means little chance of this system helping them to remember stuff better in the future. Again, modelling this process – several times if needed – is key. Narrating your thoughts out loud really helps here: “Ok, this section of notes is about the core principles of CBT as applied to offenders – what is the main purpose of this as a treatment? So I’m going to put in my left-hand column ‘What is the core principle of AM?’ as my prompt Q to remind me of the content I need to know.”
Section D: Summary sentence
This section is used to write a single sentence (typically) that summarises the information presented above. This is hard. It takes a good deal of thought and practice to be able to do this properly and cannot be done without a good understanding of the material. Where students typically get this wrong is to either write a far to broad/vague sentence that really doesn’t mean much, or try to write a paragraph (or bullet points) which is a rehash of everything in the notes section. Here’s a couple of examples based on students who have made notes on the Working memory model
Example A: “The working memory model is a model of memory which has different components.”
This is far too brief and simplistic to be a meaningful summary.
Example B: The working memory mode, a model of short-term memory, is made up of a central executive, a modality-free master system with limited capacity, and two major slave systems – the visuospatial sketchpad which processes visual information and can be use for spatial navigation, and the phonological loop which processes acoustic information and is used to mentally rehearse verbal information.
This is accurate but contains far too much detail to be a useful summary sentence.
As above, modelling this is the best way for students to learn the balance so I might narrate my thoughts as I write something like this:
| The working memory model sees short term memory as comprised of different components, each with a limited capacity, and each designed to deal with different types of information (eg visual vs acoustic)* |
One other point worth mentioning is that introducing a delay between different sections can be quite useful. For example, getting them to complete the main body of notes (section B) and then waiting a day or two to return to them before generating their questions for section C. Alternatively (or additionally), they can add a delay between completing sections B & C before completing the final summary sentence in section D. This delay allows for a bit of spaced retrieval, and looking at their notes afresh before completing these sections may allow them to see points which need developing or amending in some way.
Getting this right in the classroom
The most important principle to teach this to students is effective modelling. In pretty much their first lesson of the course, we introduce the form and rationale for Cornell notes, show them some examples and then give them a chance to do it. Ideally we model using I do, we do, you do, although time constraints often mean the ‘We do’ may be rushed, combined with the ‘I do’ or omitted. I will give them all a brief text to read, and then model on the board or visualiser how I turn this into Cornell notes. As with all good modelling, narrating your thoughts is key to ensuring students see how I am thinking about what I’m doing – simply seeing me produce it is not enough. Students then get another text and repeat the process for themselves.
I mentioned above that I set this as a regular homework and this has some significant benefits for me:
- I’m setting them something that is actually useful as this process should help with consolidation of learning, and provide them with a useful revision resource which is already designed with retrieval practice in mind. When we get nearer to assessments or exams they don’t need to start the laborious process of creating revision notes – they’ve already got them – so they can spend more time actually using them to test their knowledge.
- Setting this means not having to come up with a homework task for the sake of it, or spending time and effort finding, creating additional resources etc. And because they do it every week, once they’ve got the hang of it, there is little need to explain the task because they know exactly what I’m expecting from them
- Cornell notes don’t need taking in and marking, although they do need to be checked. I find this to be a fairly simple thing to do, adopting a whole class feedback approach. I can take them in at the beginning of a lesson while they get on with some retrieval practice questions and I can quickly scan them to look for any of the issues outlined above, plus some good model examples. Then I can either use the visualiser or gather the class to the front (the former in Covid times!) to give feedback and provide everyone with a clear model for what I’m looking for.
So there you have it. My feeling is that my students’ depth of knowledge has improved significantly through using this system, and, I hope, is also equipping them with skills that will be useful to them when they leave my classroom. However, it does need to be done properly, and focusing on the process, rather than the product, is key.
References
Marzano, R,J., Pickering, D, J., & Pollock, J, E. (2001) Classroom Instruction that Works. Alexandria: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
A Psychology Teacher writes 
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