1. The Cornell Method: Recall Built Into the Page
Divide each page into three zones: a narrow left column for cue questions, a wide right column for your actual notes, and a summary strip at the bottom. You write notes during class or reading in the right column. After the session, you cover that column and write questions in the left that the notes answer. The bottom strip gets a two-sentence summary written from memory. A 2013 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that students who generated their own retrieval cues during note-taking scored significantly higher on delayed recall tests than those who simply re-read annotated text. The cue column is the engine. Without it, Cornell is just a divided page.
