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 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 do have their rightful place among the best note-taking methods.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 are able to 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 to 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. I’ll be paraphrasing here, but hopefully, I’ll get the gist of his points across. In his 1995 study, he described the two biggest benefits of outline note-taking as follows. Between 19, he has written 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.