How to Turn Your Notes Into Practice Questions

Many notes are a record of what was said in a lecture. That is useful for checking what a topic covered, but a page you can only reread does little to prepare you for an exam. This post explains why, and shows how to turn a page of notes into questions you can test yourself with. Allow about twenty minutes for one page.

Why rereading your notes doesn't help much

A page of notes tells you what was covered. Open your notes on buffer systems and you can check that the lecture went through them, in that order, with that example.

It can't tell you whether you could write any of it with the page closed. Reading a correct page and agreeing with it is recognition. Writing the answer from memory is recall, and recall is what a written exam asks for. The two can feel much the same while you study.

So a useful test for any page of notes is whether someone could quiz you from it without giving the answers away.

What the research says

In a 2006 experiment, Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke had students read two short passages. Each student read one passage a second time and took a recall test on the other, writing down everything they could remember.

• Tested five minutes later, students remembered more of the passage they had reread: 81% against 75%.
• Tested a week later, the result reversed: 56% of the passage they had been tested on, against 42% of the one they had reread.

In a second experiment, students who read a passage four times were more confident they would remember it than students who read it once and then recalled it three times. A week later, the recall group remembered 61% of the passage and the rereading group 40%.

A review of ten common study techniques by John Dunlosky and colleagues came to a similar conclusion. It rated practice testing as one of only two techniques with high utility, and rereading as low utility. There is more on this in active recall versus rereading.

Laptop or paper?

You may have heard that handwritten notes beat typed ones. The idea comes from a 2014 study by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer. Students watched recorded talks and took notes on a laptop or by hand. The laptop notes contained more of the speaker's exact words, and the laptop group did worse on conceptual questions. The authors' explanation was that laptop users tended to copy the talk down word for word instead of putting it into their own words.

The handwriting advantage has not held up well. A replication by Kayla Morehead, John Dunlosky and Katherine Rawson found no consistent difference between the groups. A 2021 replication by Heather Urry and colleagues found the same: laptop notes were longer and closer to word for word, but quiz scores did not differ reliably between the two groups.

Two patterns did show up in both the original study and the 2021 replication. Students who wrote more words tended to score higher. Students whose notes copied the speaker word for word tended to score lower, although that second link did not hold up reliably in the replication. Whichever you use, the practical advice is the same:

• Take plenty of notes.
• Where you can, use your own words.
• Leave space to add questions later.

How to turn a page of notes into questions

1. Read one line of your notes.
2. Ask yourself what question that line answers.
3. Write the question on a separate sheet, so the answer isn't in front of you when you try it.
4. Number the line and the question so you can check your answer later.
5. Repeat for every line that holds a definition, a process or a comparison.

A worked example

Here is a line you might find in first-year economics notes:

Price elasticity of demand is the percentage change in quantity demanded divided by the percentage change in price. Demand is inelastic when this figure, ignoring the minus sign, is less than 1.

Three questions you could write from it:

1. A bus company raises its fares by 10% and the number of journeys falls by 4%. What is the price elasticity of demand, and does the company take more or less money?
2. A classmate says inelastic demand means people don't react to price at all. What is wrong with that?
3. A cinema raises its ticket prices, nothing else changes, and its takings fall. What does that tell you about demand for its tickets?

The first checks that you can use the definition. The second checks that you can spot a wrong reading of the word "inelastic". The third makes you work backwards from a result. You can't answer any of them by rereading the line.

The answers, so you can check yourself: (1) -0.4, so demand is inelastic, and the company takes about 5.6% more. (2) Inelastic means quantity changes by a smaller percentage than price. No change at all is the extreme case, called perfectly inelastic. (3) Demand is elastic at that price: the percentage fall in tickets sold was bigger than the percentage rise in price.

Questions for different kinds of notes

Most lines in a set of notes are one of three kinds, and each suits a different kind of question.

• Definitions and terms. Test both directions: term to meaning, and meaning to term. If you can only go one way, you only recognise it. These make good flashcards, because the answer is short.
• Processes and sequences. On a blank sheet, write the stages in order and say what causes each one to lead to the next. Following a sequence on the page is easier than producing it from memory.
• Comparisons. Two ideas that were clearly separate in the lecture can blur together later. Write a question that makes you tell them apart. For example, instead of "Define active and passive transport", ask: "Transport across a membrane stops when ATP production is blocked. What does that tell you, and what doesn't it tell you?"

If a line doesn't fit any of these, it is probably background, and it doesn't need a question.

Keep a list of what you get wrong

You will get some of your own questions wrong the first time. Write down what you said next to what the notes say, and keep the list. A wrong answer shows you exactly which part you haven't got yet.

The list stays short, and everything on it is something you know you need to go over. In SymbioLearn, Mistakes keeps this list for quiz questions: your answer, the right one, and the Source it came from, with the page, slide or timestamp.

What to do tonight

1. Pick one page from this week that you have already read more than once.
2. Spend twenty minutes turning it into questions, using the steps above.
3. Tomorrow, answer the questions with your notes closed, then check each answer against the page.
4. Write down every answer you got wrong, with the correct version beside it.
5. A few days later, answer the ones you got wrong again, plus a few you got right.

If you'd rather not write the questions yourself, a Quick Quiz in SymbioLearn writes 5, 10 or 15 questions from your own study material, and every answer shows the page it came from so you can check it.