For Better Memorization, You Should Mark Notes in Different Colors.
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Taking effective notes in class requires a system. There are plenty of great note-taking techniques that can help you highlight key elements of any lesson and organize them in a way that helps you study, but one of the best ways to truly absorb and remember what you’ve written is color-coding. Incorporating this technique into your existing study structure is easy and even quite fun, so here’s what to do.
How Color-Coding Your Notes Helps You Study
Using color can improve memory performance. This isn’t just a casual observation: research supports it. One 2019 study claimed that color, as a perceptual stimulus, “has a significant effect on enhancing human emotion and memory,” and found that “colorful multimedia learning materials evoke positive emotional experiences during learning and influence brain information processing.” Positive emotions increase motivation to learn, but other studies link color to memory even more directly, ignoring the emotional component entirely. For example, this 2013 literature review noted that “there appears to be a rationale for the association of color and its significant impact on memory performance.”
Other studies, such as this one from 2022 , also highlighted the importance of color for students’ self-expression, finding it “key to their satisfaction with and success in learning, as well as their future career advancement.” The study found that color-coding important text was most important for students who could control their color-coding and improve their own independent learning process.
Like many other teaching methods, we see this approach often used in elementary school, but gradually waning as students get older, although this shouldn’t be the case. Even if it was before high school, your memories of elementary school may be more vivid, and you may even remember learning something specific. For example, I remember many educational art projects I did as a child, especially when I was able to choose my own colors and patterns. Applying the same combination of self-determination, active decision-making, and imagination to more advanced subjects can’t hurt.
How to use color coding for your notes
As research on this topic has shown, color coding is as much about independent learning and self-expression as it is about memory and retention. This means there’s no right or wrong way to color code your notes.
You can use different colored pens for notes, for example, red for key points and black for additional information. This also works well when using a critical reading framework like SQ3R or KWL . Let’s say you use KWL, where the page is divided into three columns labeled “Know,” ” Want to Know,” and “Learn.” In the “Learn to Know” column, you write down answers to the questions posed in the “Want to Know” section, so you can highlight them in a different color to make them more visible.
Or you can use highlighters to encode specific information. For example, yellow might indicate key points, blue might indicate things you’re unsure about, green might indicate words from your list, and so on. The key is to create a unified system that you can use across all your notes so you begin to associate different colors with specific ideas or concepts.
You can do this during class, while taking notes to actively identify key concepts, words, and the like from the start, or while reviewing and analyzing your notes to better organize them. Color coding is especially useful during review, as it allows you to quickly scan a page and, for example, highlight all the important dates in a history lesson if you’ve highlighted them in a specific color beforehand.
At the beginning of each notebook, create a color chart to remind yourself what each pen or highlighter shade represents, and stick to it. Of course, you can do the same if you’re typing notes in a word processor, but keep in mind that research shows that handwritten materials are more memorable .
Once you’ve created a color scheme, stick to it throughout your learning process. When creating flashcards , make sure key points are highlighted in yellow, words in green, or any other color that matches the structure you’re using. The same goes for creating mind maps (which is, of course, a good idea), which will help you visualize your notes and course materials. The colors of the bubbles and text should match the shades you’ve assigned to different elements of your content. To make this easier, use an app. My favorite for creating mind maps is Xmind , which offers a variety of color options.