When we revise, our ultimate goal is to move our knowledge and understanding from our working memory, to long term memory.

When we read presentations and watch videos, the knowledge and understanding that we have gained sits in our working memory and unless we revisit this knowledge, it will be forgotten.

In order to move knowledge and understanding from working memory to long term memory (where we will retain that knowledge long into the future) we need to actively revisit our understanding and this is where the Cornell method of note taking is so good!

The first step of this method is like any other note taking method. When reading presentations and watching videos, we pause after a while, think about what we have learnt and write succinct notes on that learning.

But, once we have finished working on the subtopic and our notes are complete, the Cornell method has two more steps, proven to help begin the process of moving this understanding to long term memory:

1. We re-read our notes and draw out key points, words and questions and write them in the left side column.
2. Then later, we summaries the notes on the page into a sentence or two.

This process helps to distil and condense our understanding into the key points and by revisiting content, we begin the process of moving our understanding to long term memory.