The Cornell Note-Taking Method, Step by Step

What are Cornell notes?

Cornell notes are a way of laying out a page so that the notes you take in class become something you study from, not just something you file. The method was developed in the 1950s by Walter Pauk, an education professor at Cornell University, and described in his book How to Study in College. It has been taught in schools and universities ever since, partly because it needs nothing but paper and a ruler.

The page has three zones, and each one is filled at a different time. That timing is the real point of the method: it builds in a second look at the material within a day of hearing it, and a ready-made way to test yourself on it later.

How to take Cornell notes, step by step

Pauk summed up the method as five Rs: record, reduce, recite, reflect and review. The steps below follow that sequence, starting with the page setup. Rule your pages before class, so you are not drawing lines while the lecturer starts talking.

1. 1Set up the page: draw a horizontal line about 2 inches from the bottom, and a vertical line about 2.5 inches from the left edge, running down to it. Write the course, date and topic at the top.
2. 2Record: during class, take notes in the right-hand column. Capture main ideas, definitions, examples and anything the lecturer repeats or writes on the board, in short phrases rather than full sentences.
3. 3Reduce: within a day, read through your notes and write questions or key words in the left column, level with the notes that answer them.
4. 4Recite: cover the notes column with a sheet of paper, read each cue, and answer it aloud or on scrap paper. Then uncover and check.
5. 5Reflect: write the summary at the bottom, and note how the topic connects to earlier lectures or the reading.
6. 6Review: come back to the page in later study sessions, starting with the cue column and the summary instead of rereading the notes.

What to write in the notes column

The notes column is for capturing, not transcribing. If you try to write every sentence, you fall behind and stop thinking about what you hear. Aim to record the structure of the lecture: the main points, the evidence or examples for each, and the links between them. Leave a blank line or two between ideas so you can add to them later. For more on keeping up when a lecture moves fast, see how to take notes in lectures.

Here is an example from an introductory psychology lecture on classical conditioning. The notes column might read: neutral stimulus (bell) paired repeatedly with unconditioned stimulus (food) leads to salivation at the bell alone, now a conditioned response; Pavlov's dogs as the classic case; extinction when the bell keeps sounding with no food. Short phrases, arrows and abbreviations are fine, as long as you will still understand them tomorrow.

Writing cue questions that make you think

The cue column is where Cornell notes earn their keep, and it is also the easiest step to skip. Write cues as questions, not labels. “Classical conditioning” in the left column only reminds you of a topic; “How does a neutral stimulus become a conditioned stimulus?” makes you produce an answer. Aim for one or two questions for each block of notes.

Write them within a day of the class, while you still remember which points the lecturer stressed. Deciding what question each chunk of notes answers is itself a review, and it often reveals places where your notes are too thin to answer anything. Mark those and fill them from the textbook or a classmate's notes. Good cues for the psychology page might be:

• What has to happen for a neutral stimulus to become a conditioned stimulus?
• Why did the dogs start salivating at the bell before any food appeared?
• What is the difference between an unconditioned and a conditioned response?
• What happens during extinction, and does it mean the original learning is erased?
• Where might classical conditioning show up in everyday life?

Reciting and summarizing: turning notes into a self-test

Reciting is the step that does the most for memory, because it is active recall in its simplest form. Cover the right-hand column, read the first cue, and answer it fully before you look. If you get it wrong or only half right, put a small mark next to the cue. The marked cues are where your next study session starts.

The summary at the bottom calls for a different skill: deciding what the page was actually about. Write it without looking at the notes, in two to four sentences. For the psychology page, it might say that classical conditioning pairs a neutral stimulus with one that already triggers a response until the neutral one triggers it alone, and that the response fades if the pairing stops. If you cannot write the summary, you have not yet understood the page, which is far better to find out now than in the exam.

Adapting Cornell notes to textbooks, math and digital notes

The three zones work well beyond lectures. The key is to keep the timing: capture first, question later, summarize last.

Cornell notes mistakes to avoid

Most problems with the method come from treating the layout as the whole technique. A page with neat lines and an empty cue column is just ordinary notes with a wide margin. Watch for these habits:

• Filling the cue column with single words instead of questions you have to answer.
• Leaving the cues and summary until the week before the exam, when you no longer remember what mattered.
• Writing so much during class that you stop listening.
• Rereading the notes column during review instead of covering it and reciting.
• Copying the textbook's chapter summary instead of writing your own.