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To take the best notes in class, you need a system. There are a lot of great note-taking techniques that can help you identify the key elements of any lesson and organize them in a way that will help you study—but one of the best ways to actually learn and retain what the notes say is by color-coding. It’s easy and even kind of fun to work this technique into your existing study structure, so here’s what to do.
How color-coding your notes helps you study
Using color can improve the performance of your memory. This isn’t just a throwaway observation: Research has backed it up. One study from 2019 asserted that color, a perceptual stimulus, has “significant impact on improving human emotion and memory” and found “colored multimedia learning materials induced positive emotional experiences during learning and influenced the brain’s information processing.” Positive emotion increased motivation to learn there, but other studies have even more directly linked color to memory, skipping the emotional part altogether. For instance, this literature review from 2013 noted that “there appears to be a basis for associating color and its significant effect on memory abilities.”
Other studies, like this one from 2022, have pointed to how vital the use of color is for students’ self-expression, too, finding it “a key to their being satisfied with the learning process and its success, as well as with their future career growth.” The study found that color-coding important text was most important for students, who could control their color-coding and enhance their own self-study process.
As with a lot of studying and learning techniques, we see this applied a lot in the early years of school, but it phases out as learners get older—though it shouldn’t. Even though it was further back than high school, your memories of elementary school may be more vivid and you may even remember learning specific things. I remember a lot of educational art projects I did as a kid, for instance, especially when I got to choose the colors and designs I used. Applying that same mix of self-determination, active decision-making, and whimsy to more advanced studies can’t hurt.
How to color-code your notes
As made clear in the research on the topic, color-coding is as much about self-driven study and expression as it is about memory and retention, which means there’s no right or wrong way to color-code your own notes.
You can use different colors of pen as you take the notes, for instance using red to write out key points and black to fill in supplemental information. This works well when you’re using a critical reading framework, like SQ3R or KWL, too. Say you’re using KWL, where you split your page into three columns and label them Know, Want to know, and Learn. The “learn” column is where you write the answers to the questions you posit in “want to know,” so you could consider writing those in a different color so they really stick out.
What do you think so far?
Or, you could use highlighters to code certain kinds of info. For instance, yellow can signify key points, blue can indicate things you’re not sure about, green could be vocabulary words, and so forth. The key is to create a system that is uniform and can be used across all your notes so you start associating the different colors with certain ideas or concepts.
You can do this in class as you take notes so even from the start, you’re actively identifying key concepts, vocab words, and the like, or you can do it while you revise and review your notes to help you organize them better. Color-coding is especially helpful in review, as you can quickly scan a page to identify, say, all the important dates in a history lesson—provided you took a few seconds to highlight them in a certain color beforehand.
In the front of each notebook, make a color-coded directory to remind yourself what each pen or highlighter hue represents, then stick to it. You can, of course, do this if you’re typing your notes in a word processing document, too, but bear in mind that research suggests you’ll remember hand-written materials better.
Once you create a color-coding structure, stick to it in all areas of your studying. When making flashcards, make sure to keep your key points yellow, your vocab words green, or whatever makes sense with the structure you’re using. The same goes if you’re creating mind maps (which you should be) to help you visualize your notes and course materials. Make your bubble or text colors align with the hues you’ve assigned to different elements of your content. To make that even easier, use an app. My favorite for mind maps is Xmind, which allows for plenty of color-picking options.
