Note-taking for medical school: 6 methods compared

Methods that make you retrieve the answer help most. Methods that only let you look at the answer help least. A review of 10 learning techniques by Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) gave practice testing a high utility assessment and put summarising, highlighting, and rereading among the five techniques it rated low utility.

That gives you one test for any method. Does it force you to pull the answer out of memory? Or does it let your eyes slide over the page? The review's own advice is to use practice testing instead of rereading.

This is why beautiful notes disappoint. Reformatting and colour-coding a lecture is a copying task. The page then feels familiar when you reread it. That is not the same as being able to produce the answer. In Roediger and Karpicke (2006), repeated studying made students more confident. On tests 2 days or 1 week later, students who had been tested instead retained substantially more.

Question-based notes and Cornell notes with question cues force the most retrieval. Outlines and mind maps are good for structure but need a recall step added. Highlighting and verbatim transcripts force almost none.

Mind maps deserve a note. They show how a system connects. Looking at a finished map is still not retrieval. In Karpicke and Blunt (2011), practising retrieval produced greater gains in meaningful learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping. The advantage held even when the final test asked students to create concept maps. Draw the map to understand. Redraw it from a blank page to remember.

If you only change one habit this term, replace highlighter passes with question-and-answer passes. Keep the outline or the mind map if it helps you understand. Then add the recall step.

Flip each statement into the question an exam would ask and hide the answer. Keep one idea per question so a gap is obvious. Make it specific enough that there is one clear right answer.

Here is an example from page 3 of our public bone and joint sample sheet, the table that asks you to name the infected compartment.

You can skim the statement column in ten seconds. The question column makes you produce each answer. Cover the answers (or put them on the back of a card) and you have a self-test you can rerun all term.

The high-yield notes tool lays the same page out as a compartment table with the condition, site, local clue, and sample in columns. Cover any column and it becomes a set of questions.

Split the page into a narrow cue column on the left, a wide notes area on the right, and a summary strip at the bottom. Write questions in the cue column instead of keywords. When you review, cover the notes area and answer the cues from memory.

• Notes area (during the lecture): lean cues and key points. Capture less than you think you need.
• Cue column (same day): one question for each point in the notes area. This is where the recall comes from.
• Summary strip (same day): one or two sentences in your own words, written from memory if you can.
• Review (that week): cover the notes area, read only the cue column, and answer out loud before you check.

Treat the summary strip as a check that you understood the page rather than as your study method. Summarising on its own was rated low utility in the 2013 review. The questions in the cue column do the work.

Cornell works on paper or as a two-column template in a notes app. The layout matters less than covering the answers and answering the cues.

Use whichever lets you think instead of transcribe. The well-known finding that longhand beats laptops did not hold up consistently when it was replicated. What matters more is whether you copy the lecture word for word.

In Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014), students who took notes on laptops did worse on conceptual questions than students who wrote longhand across three studies. The authors linked this to laptop users' tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim instead of reframing ideas in their own words.

A 2019 direct replication by Morehead, Dunlosky, and Rawson found that performance did not consistently differ between longhand, laptop, and eWriter groups. In their second experiment it did not consistently differ from a group who took no notes either. Combining direct replications showed only small, nonsignificant effects favouring longhand.

The practical rule: whichever tool you use, do not transcribe. Laptop notes are faster to turn into flashcards. Handwriting forces you to choose what to write. Either works if the notes end up as questions.

Less than you think. Write what you could not rebuild on your own: specific numbers, exceptions to a rule, and the explanation that made a confusing slide click. Skip what is already on slides you will have later.

• In the lecture: cues, numbers, exceptions, and anything that surprised you.
• Same day: skim the slides once to fill obvious holes. Then close them.
• Within 24 hours: rebuild the topic from memory on a blank page and mark every gap.
• That week: turn the gaps into questions and test yourself instead of rereading.

Rebuilding a topic from memory is retrieval practice. The gaps you hit are your to-do list for the week.

Lift each question note onto a card and keep only the high-yield ones. Review the cards after growing gaps. Then test yourself on questions you did not write to see whether you can handle a stem you have never seen.

A question note is already a flashcard. Distributed practice (spreading reviews out over time) received the same high utility assessment as practice testing in the 2013 review. Review a card today, again a few days later, and again after a week.

Only make cards from points that matter: testable facts, classic associations, and easy-to-confuse pairs. A deck you finish beats a 200-card deck you abandon in week three.

If your notes are from a Year 2 anatomy block, test them against prepared Year 2 questions. They include 1,500+ in anatomy and 700+ in physiology. The full question bank has 30,000+ questions for all five years of medical school. Every question explains every option.

Run the same four steps for every lecture: capture less, write questions the same day, answer them within 24 hours, and drill the gaps that week. It takes a few short sessions instead of one long rewrite.

1. In the lecture: capture cues, numbers, exceptions, and the explanation that made a slide click. Do not transcribe.
2. Same day (10 to 15 minutes): write a question for each key point in a cue column plus a one-line summary. Close the slides.
3. Within 24 hours (15 minutes): cover your notes, answer your questions out loud, and mark every gap.
4. That week (short, spaced sessions): turn the gaps and high-yield points into flashcards and practice questions. Drill them until you can answer them cold.

Measure a session by how many questions you can answer cold rather than by how the page looks.