Many students settle on one way of taking notes around middle school and use it for everything. But classes are not shaped alike. A history lecture marches through dates and weighs causes. A biology lecture keeps circling back to how one process feeds the next. A chemistry class races from one worked problem to another. One style of page fits one of those and fights the other two.

This notebook gives each class its own tab and rules each page for the way that class is actually taught.

Five ways to rule a page

College learning centers usually teach these five side by side, and the descriptions and advice on when each earns its place follow the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga's guide to common note-taking methods.

• Outline. Main points sit against the margin, with details indented beneath them. It suits a lecture that is itself organized point by point and slow enough to let you place each idea. When the pace gets too quick, the outline falls apart.
• Cornell. Notes go in a wide right-hand column during class; afterward you write a cue beside each chunk and sum up the page across the bottom. Walter Pauk devised it while teaching education at Cornell, and Cornell's Learning Strategies Center still credits him. This notebook is an independent tool with no connection to Cornell University. The Chattanooga guide recommends Cornell for any kind of lecture. For a full Cornell page that covers the notes and quizzes you on the cues, try the Cornell notes sheet.
• Mapping. Today's topic goes in the middle, and each big idea branches off it with its facts below. It shows at a glance how ideas relate, and copes with a guest speaker whose plan you cannot guess.
• Charting. You draw columns before class, one per category, such as date, people, cause and result, and drop each fact into its column. It shines when a test will ask for the facts and for how they compare.
• Sentence. Every new fact gets its own numbered line. It keeps up with a fast, crowded lecture, at the cost of grouping the lines yourself after class.

How the notebook chooses

Tap a class onto a tab and its page asks three things: how the class is taught, what its tests ask for, and how fast it moves. Each answer adds weight to whichever methods the guide above favors for that situation. A class that moves through time, with tests built on comparisons, comes out as charting; one whose big ideas link up comes out as mapping. The page stamps the method on the tab and names the answers that pushed it there.

The wording is careful on purpose: your answers lean toward a method. It is a first guess, so you can answer again or pick another method with one tap. The line above the tabs gathers every class into one sentence, so you can see which method goes with which class.

Taking the notes

Write a line, then add it as a point, a detail, a row, a cell or a branch, depending on the ruling. Behind every ruling, your notes are kept as points with up to three details each, so switching methods redraws the same notes in a new shape instead of losing them. Try a sentence-method page as a chart and the empty cells show exactly where the facts never got grouped.

A page holds twelve points with up to three details under each, and hitting that ceiling usually means the lecture covered two topics that deserve two pages.

What the research does and does not say

The matching rules did not come out of trials that put history students on charts and biology students on maps. They come from learning centers that have watched many students take notes, so treat them as seasoned advice, not settled science.

What the research does support is narrower. A meta-analysis of thirty-three studies found that taking notes and then reviewing them made a substantial difference to learning, and that handing students a framework to fill in helped more than training or instructions alone. In two experiments by Robinson and Kiewra, college students who studied material laid out as graphic organizers instead of outlines, and were given enough time, learned more of the relations between ideas and wrote more integrated essays. The shape of a page changes what you can see in it, which is the case for choosing that shape on purpose.

The review line

Every page ends with one line: after class, the lesson in a sentence of your own, written while you still remember what was stressed. It is the smallest possible review, and it leaves you something to test yourself against. When the exam gets close, turn those lines into questions for The Active Recall Deck, or close the notebook and see how much of a page you can rebuild on The Blurting Pad.

When to use it

Set the notebook up in the first week of a semester and adjust after two or three lectures, once you know how each teacher runs the room. If one class's notes still feel like a mess by midterms, that is the tab to rule differently. When the job shifts from taking notes to studying them, The Study Techniques Cabinet matches techniques to the test and the time you have.