T. R. Girill
Technical Literacy Project
trgirill@acm.org
How can you apply the psychological and historical insights from our notetaking overview to build the practical skills of your science students?
The basic explanatory techniques in the good-description guidelines apply to one's own notes, just as they help improve talks and posters in science. And as with talks and posters, the specific constraints that notetaking imposes influence how to focus those techniques on the special communication demands of this task. The "Taking Notes Effectively" checklist "reveals this magic" to students by
This checklist thus brings cognitive apprenticeship to bear on building student notetaking skills: first expose the hidden moves that "masters" routinely (but unobtrousively) use, then promote iterative practice toward mastery of those same moves by students.
Frederic L. Holmes's historical study of Hans Krebs's laboratory notebooks (see "Noteworthy Content" in the overview) revealed one common weakness in the notes taken by young scientists: their scope is too narrow. This failure to thoroughly record (and thereby share) one's own goals, plans, and struggles is so common a trait among scientists and engineers that historians of science even have a name for it: lack of interiority (Bycroft, 2010). Like so many flaws in (personal and) professional life, however, this can largely be cured with a few well-chosen techniques.
The "Taking Notes Effectively" chart therefore offers students some scaffolding to promote a more inclusive, strategic approach to notetaking. They should still not clog their notes with trivia, of course, but this chart gives them three sets of thematic cues for building more inclusive notes:
A document that captures a dispute between Charles Darwin and his father Robert in 1831 provides a nice history-of-science example of how the techniques listed on "Taking Notes Effectively" can improve the usability of science notes. (Your students can work the historical case sequentially themselves, as shown here, or they can use it as a model for improving their own notes.)
In August, 1831, Charles Darwin received an invitation
to serve as naturalist on a round-the-world voyage by
the HMS Beagle (the trip that greatly influenced
his developing views on species evolution).
His father argued against taking the job, however, offering many
personal and professional objections, which Charles
summarized in these words (see Dolgin, 2009):
The previous examples involve techniques for note improvement that also apply to other technical texts. But special usability scaffolds also exist that are seldom appropriate elswhere yet often boost the effectiveness of technical notes.
The most influential of these note-specific improvement techniques is the use of a two-column format: one's primary notes go into a (relatively wide) right-hand column and diverse commentary goes into a (relatively narrow) left-hand column on every notebook page. Swarthmore's Colin Purrington explains why splitting each note page vertically improves the usability of notes: "Keeping a notebook gives you a forum to talk to yourself, to ask questions" (Purrington, 2009). Using two columns gives you a place to carry on that conversation, namely, in the left-hand column of every page.
This two-column scaffold has been much publicized by Cornell University, and many people call this approach "Cornell notes." I suspected that this technique predated Cornell's influence, however, since attorneys and college debaters everywhere often use a similar dual-column note format to capture in parallel what their opponents are claiming and how they plan to counter each claim.
Actually, the history of science reveals that the usability
benefits of two-column notes were recognized 500 years ago.
In his journals and notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci, writing
around 1500, used two columns to align his diagrams with
his explanatory text, as this sample shows:
For the science classroom, several variations on this dual-column scaffolding are available to prompt student self-comment.
Taking effective notes, for oneself in the short term and for colleagues in the long term, is often a crucial aspect of successful crime-scene or medical investigation. Usability features are so important in CSI or medical notes that professional textbooks for those careers often contain chapters with explicit note-taking advice. The handbook section called "CSI As A Window Onto Technical Writing" explains more fully this authentic role for note-taking in the investigative professions. Also included there are specific references (most are free online) and real-life examples that can be (and often already have been) adapted into skill-building activities for science students.
Using any two-column note template implies, even encourages, "improving" one's original notes (by adding comments and other usability aids) after capturing a first version. Likewise, ethnographic studies of working biologists have revealed that some take notes in two stages (quick but crude, then redrafted more carefully into formal notebooks). See description-drafting Exercise 9 for a link to these empirical studies and a discussion of their strategic implications. Of course, such editing can change the evidence value of notes in patent or priority disputes. For students struggling to create merely adequate lab or lecture notes in class, however, such legal concerns may never arise and improved usablity for themselves may be everyone's primary goal.