To take the best notes in class, you need a system. There are many great note-taking techniques that can help you identify the most important elements of a lesson and organize them for study. But one of the best ways to actually learn and remember what’s in your notes is through color coding.

Using color can improve your memory performance. This isn’t just a throwaway observation: Research has backed it up. A 2019 study claimed that color, a perceptual stimulus, “has a significant impact on enhancing human emotion and memory,” finding that “colored multimedia learning materials elicited positive emotional experiences during learning and influenced the brain’s information processing.” Positive emotion increased motivation to learn, but other research has linked color to memory even more directly, skipping the emotional part altogether. For example, this 2013 literature review noted that “there appears to be a basis for color association and its significant effect on memory skills.”

Other studies, such as this 2022 study, have also noted how important the use of color is to students’ self-expression, finding it “a key to their satisfaction with the learning process and its success, as well as to their future career development.” The study found that color-coding important text was most important to students, who could control their color-coding and improve their own self-study process.

As the research on the subject makes clear, color coding is as much about self-directed study and expression as it is about memory and recall. So there is no right or wrong way to color code your own notes.