You Should Color Code Your Notes to Help You Remember Them Better

To take better notes in class, you need a system. There are many great note-taking techniques that can help you identify the key elements of any lesson and organize them in a way that helps you study, but one of the best ways to actually learn and remember what your notes say is color coding.

How Color-Coding Your Notes Helps You Learn

Using color can improve your memory. This is not just a random observation: research has confirmed it. One 2019 study claimed that color, a perceptual stimulus, has a “significant impact on improving human emotion and memory,” and found that “colorful multimedia learning materials induce positive emotional experiences during learning and influence information processing in the brain.” Positive emotions increase motivation to learn, but other studies link color even more directly to memory, skipping the emotional part altogether. For example, a 2013 literature review noted that “there appears to be a basis for the association of color and its significant influence on memory performance.”

Other studies, like this one from 2022 , have shown how important the use of color is for students’ self-expression, citing it as “key to their satisfaction with the learning process and its success, as well as their results.” future career growth.” The study found that color coding important text was most important for students to control their color coding and improve their self-learning process.

How to color code your notes

As has become clear from research on this topic, color coding is not only associated with independent learning and self-expression, but also with memory and retention, meaning that there is no right or wrong way to color code your own notes.

However, you can use different colored pens when taking notes, for example using red to write down key points and black to fill in additional information. Or you can use markers to encode certain types of information. For example, yellow could represent key points, blue could represent things you’re unsure of, green could represent vocabulary words, etc. The key is to create a consistent system that can be used across all of your notes so that you start to associate different colors with certain ideas or concepts.

On the front of each notebook, create a color-coded catalog to remind yourself what each shade of pen or marker represents, then stick to it.