Cornell Notes
Cornell notes are often associated with making useful lecture or seminar notes; however, they can be equally helpful when revising for exams!
Cornell notes can help you reflect on and refine your revision — which is particularly useful in identifying and memorising what is most important to the topic of your exam!
Cornell notes have three sections: Details, Key Points, and Summary.
1. In the Details section, write down all the important bits of information you discover about a topic while researching and reading. This can include quotes, statistics, diagrams or paraphrased information.
2. In the Key Points section, write down all the questions and thoughts you have about the details of your reading. The thoughts and questions you record here will guide further revision on where you may want to focus next.
3. In the Summary section, in your own words write a summary of everything you have learned and recorded in the two other sections. Summarising a lot of information into a few sentences helps to really focus on what is important — this is a very useful revision strategy!
Next Steps
Build up your ability to summarise and synthesise lots of information by combining all your Summary sections into a one page summary of the topic. Synthesising lots of information together like this will be very useful when revising and preparing for exams!
Revision Combo!
Combining Cornell notes with other revision techniques can enhance your revision even further. Cornell notes are particularly useful when combined with Dual Coding. To use this technique, try to represent your notes in a different format by drawing the information from your Summary section — this will help visualise what you have learned. You can even work your way up to drawing your summary from memory!
