Use of Student Notes and Lecture Summaries as Study Guides for Recall

Abstract

This study represents an extension of previous research on interfering and facilitating variables affecting the encoding function of note taking by adding several review conditions. Ninety-six subjects were assigned to five note-taking and three non-note-taking groups. Subjects heard a 16-minute segmented lecture and recalled lecture content 48 hours later. The review of notes neutralized both the interfering and facilitating effects on recall of note-taking manipulations reported in previous research. Review of student-generated notes resulted in better recall than did review of lecturer-generated summaries.     

The effect of field dependence and outline condition on learning high- and low-structure information from a lecture

Sixty-eight college students participated in the current research investigating the effects of an outline on field-dependent and field-independent students' learning of structurally important and less important information from a lecture. The lecture involved a 20-minute videotaped presentation on bird migration. Learning was assessed using a free recall task 10 minutes after the lecture (immediate recall) and both free recall and probed recall tasks one week after the lecture (delayed recall). Data were analyzed using mixed factorial ANOVAs. Results indicated that the outline assisted the field-dependent students in recall of high structure information and field-independent students in recall of low structure information. Performance of field-dependent and field-independent students was equivalent on probed recall of low-structure information, but significant differences were found on the free recall of low-structure information. It is proposed that these differences are attributable to superior organizational abilities of the field-independent students and to use of the outline as a guide for retrieval.     

The Effects of Strategic Notetaking on the Recall and Comprehension of Lecture Information for High School Students with Learning Disabilities

This investigation examined the effects of strategic notetaking on the recall and comprehension of high school students with learning disabilities (LD) or educable mental retardation (EMR). Twenty-six students with high incidence disabilities (LD or EMR) were randomly assigned by grade and disability to either an experimental or control group. Using strategic notetaking, students in the experimental group were taught to independently take notes while viewing a videotaped lecture. Students who were taught strategic notetaking scored significantly higher on measures of immediate free recall, long-term free recall, comprehension, and number of notes recorded than students in the control group who used conventional notetaking. The limitations of the research and implications of this technique for classroom application are discussed.     

A review of note-taking: The encoding-storage paradigm and beyond

This review article investigates the encoding and storage functions of note-taking. The encoding function suggests that the process of taking notes, which are not reviewed, is facilitative. Research specifying optimal note-taking behaviors is discussed as are several means for facilitating note-taking, such as viewing a lecture multiple times, note-taking on a provided framework, or generative note-taking activities. The storage function suggests that the review of notes also is facilitative. Research addressing particular review behaviors, such as organization and elaboration, is discussed as are the advantages of reviewing provided notes, borrowed notes, or notes organized in a matrix form. In addition, cognitive factors related to note-taking and review are discussed. The article concludes with an alternative means for defining and investigating the functions of note-taking, and with implications for education and for research.     

Text-Comprehension Strategies Based on Outlines

Prior to studying an instructional text, college students were given either a topically relevant outline or a topically irrelevant (control) outline and asked to generate propositions about the topics by drawing upon their existing knowledge. The results indicate that comprehension was highest among those students who activated relevant prior knowledge before text study, and who were again provided with an outline of that knowledge during testing. The measure of comprehension used here was total meaningful recall: It included text propositions plus valid elaborations based on the interaction of text information and students’ existing knowledge. The results of conceptual clustering analyses suggest that organization was one of the mechanisms by which topical outlines increased meaningful recall. Additional analyses conducted only on the elaborations indicate that students produced more of them during long-term (six week) recall than during immediate recall.     

Multimedia,It's How You Use It

SUMMARY

The current study chronicles what one professor learned from teaching a distance education course with and without the aid of PowerPoint multimedia presentation software. It compares student ratings of three lectures from the same classes by the same professor; the first, a traditional lecture without any audiovisual aids; the second, a lecture supplemented by PowerPoint notes outlining the lecture; and finally, a multimedia lecture utilizing PowerPoint notes with pictures, music and animations. Students reacted no differently to any of the presentations when delivered by an experienced teacher. The students did, however, prefer PowerPoint multimedia to PowerPoint outline presentations. Suggestions for the optimal uses of presentation software are provided.     

The role of time and cuing in a college lecture

The lecture process was studied systematically with the following objectives: to reexamine the effects of time upon note-taking and immediate retention, to compare the relative effectiveness of spoken and written cues, and to investigate cuing schedules. Students were asked to view one of a series of videotaped lectures in which certain statements were highlighted by either spoken or written cues. The contents of students' notes and assessments of immediate recall and recognition provided the dependent measures. Students recorded increasingly less information in their notes over the course of the lecture, but retention of material from different portions of the lecture was essentially the same. Written-cued statements were recorded more frequently and retained better than statements preceded by spoken cues. Finally, the different schedules of cuing were shown to have subtle effects upon note-taking and recall.     

Students' note-taking behaviors and the efficacy of providing the instructor's notes for review

College students viewed a videotaped lecture with or without taking notes. Average performance between the two groups did not differ on an immediate test. The encoding effect of note taking was therefore unsupported. Two days later, note takers reviewed their notes while listeners reviewed the instructor's notes in preparation for the delayed exam. Subjects who reviewed the instructor's notes achieved significantly more, on factual items, than did subjects who reviewed their own relatively brief and unorganized notes. Thus, listening to a lecture and subsequently reviewing the instructor's notes prior to a delayed exam leads to relatively higher achievement than does the traditional method of taking and reviewing personal lecture notes.     

Getting Students “Partially” Involved in Note-Taking Using Graphic Organizers

Encoding benefits (DiVesta & Gray, 1972) of graphic-organizer and outline note-taking using spaced study and review (Robinson, Katayama, Dubois, & DeVaney, 1998) were investigated. In 2 40-min periods separated by 2 days, 117 undergraduates studied a chapter-length text along with a set of complete, partial, or skeletal graphic organizers or outlines. Two days later, the students reviewed their materials for 10 min and then completed factual and application tests. On the factual test, there was no effect for either study notes or amount of information. However, on the application test, graphic organizers were better than outlines and partial notes were better than complete notes. Having students take notes using partial graphic organizers may be preferable to giving them complete notes because of encoding benefits.     

A more equitable account of the note-taking functions in learning from lecture and from text

Previous research investigating the encoding, encoding-plus-storage, and extermal-storage functions of note taking has failed to equate processing opportunities among the groups. The present studies did so by having the encoding group take notes on two occasions without review, the encoding-plus-storage group take notes one time and review notes the next, and the external-storage group twice review a set of borrowed notes. Three forms of note taking were used: conventional, and note taking on skeletal and matrix frameworks. In both Experiment 1, involving lecture learning, and Experiment 2, involving text learning, an advantage was found for the encoding-plus-storage function on tests involving factual-recall and recognition performance but not on tests measuring higher-order performance. With respect to note-taking forms, no advantage existed for any form when information was acquired from lecture. When text material was used there was some advantage for conventional notes and a clear advantage for not taking notes at all, but instead twice reading the material. These findings were explained relative to observed note-taking behaviors, the opportunity for review, and the processing demands proposed by the combination of reading and note taking, particularly when notes must be classified into an existing framework.     

The encoding versus the external storage hypothesis in note taking

College students (N = 85) read a passage in which each sentence had been normatively assessed as to its importance to the overall meaning of the passage. Students expecting an essay examination took notes on sentences of higher structural importance than those anticipating a multiple choice test, even though there was no difference in the number of notes taken or in total test performance. The students took notes on 31% of the passage sentences and such notes were of high structural importance value. Most importantly, note taking seemed to serve as both an encoding device and as an external storage mechanism, with the latter being the more important function. The external storage function not only led to enhanced recall of the notes, but also facilitated the reconstruction of other parts of the passage.     

Note-Taking and Memory in Different Media Environments

Through this study the authors investigated undergraduate students’ memory recall in three media environments with three note-taking options, following an A x B design with nine experiments. The three environments included no-distraction, auditory-distraction, and auditory–visual-distraction; while the three note-taking options included no-note-taking, taking-notes-on-paper, and taking-notes-on-computer. The results of word recalls from 21 participants showed significant interactions between media environments and note-taking options. In the no-distraction environment, the participants had better word recall taking notes on paper than taking notes on computer or not taking notes. However, in the auditory–visual-distraction environment, the participants had better word recall with no note taking than taking notes on computer or taking notes on paper. The participants’ comments provided insights for implications for learning in different media environments.     

The Relationship of First-Grade Readiness to Third- and Fourth-Grade Achievement

Abstract

In meaningful learning tasks the acquisition process is influenced by the way in which the individual learner interprets and encodes the material. Early attempts to recall written materials largely determine subsequent retention, even when the learner's errors are corrected. To provide an indication of how information was interpreted and encoded by learners, adult students were asked to write notes on a meaningful prose extract they heard, and they were later asked to attempt recall. Whereas the meaningful items recorded in a subject's notes had a .34 probability of recall one week later, items not recorded in notes were recalled on only .047 of occasions, suggesting that the notes learners make provide a useful indication of the products of individual encoding processes In meaningful verbal learning and memory.     

Stop Counting the Books! IMC is Here

Students with mild disabilities have a difficult time recording notes from lectures. Accurate note taking is important because it helps students understand the content from lectures and notes serve as a document for later review. In this article, the author describes what teachers can do before, during, and after the lecture to help students become better note takers.     

The process of review: A levels of processing approach

This experiment investigated the effects of reviewing notes at a deeper level of abstraction, by means of reorganization. No differences in immediate recognition performance were found for subjects who reorganized notes into an instructor-generated matrix versus subjects who reviewed in their typical manner. An interaction between method of review and type of delayed test was apparent. Reorganization during review resulted in relatively higher achievement on a free recall test while unstructured review produced higher achievement on a cued recall exam. This interaction was unpredicted by the theory of encoding specificity but was explained in regard to the theory of episode matching. Instructionally, reorganization was advocated as a review technique for most learning situations in which retrieval cues are not imposed.     

The Influence of Critical Reading Orientation on External Strategy Use during Expository Text Reading

This study examined the influence of critical reading orientation on use of external strategies such as note‐taking and underlining while reading an expository text. In two experiments, undergraduate students were asked either to review an article on a linguistic policy (critical reading) or to summarise it (less‐critical reading). Experiment 1 indicated that, when permitted to do so, the majority of students used note‐taking and/or underlining strategies for critical reading as well as for less‐critical reading. In Experiment 2, an analysis of think‐aloud protocols, notes, and underlines revealed that critical readers produced more critical notes/underlines and fewer summary notes than did less‐critical readers. Also, critical readers substantially increased their production of critical notes/underlines over the course of reading and decreased highlightings, whereas less‐critical readers increased summary notes and decreased highlightings.     

Notetaking and review: The research and its implications

Notetaking and review are positively related to academic achievement, but many students record too few notes to benefit fully from these activities. This paper presents ten factors that may constrain notetaking and review, and provides corresponding implications for improving these study behaviors and for conducting further research. Some instructional implications are that students should record more extensive and conceptual notes and that instructors can help students by organizing their presentations, reducing lecture rate, pausing for notetaking, emphasizing key ideas and encouraging alternate frameworks for notetaking and review. Instructors can also facilitate learning by providing learners with notes for review and with knowledge about testing. In addition, instructors should consider the cognitive processing differences among students because certain learners are likely to find notetaking dysfunctional relative to other means of acquisition. The implications for research focus on determining the optimal notetaking and review activities.     

The (Embodied) Performance of Physics Concepts in Lectures

Lectures are often thought of in terms of information transfer: students (do not) “get” or “construct meaning of” what physics professors (lecturers) say and the notes they put on the chalkboard (overhead). But this information transfer view does not explain, for example, why students have a clear sense of understanding while they sit in a lecture and their subsequent experiences of failure to understand their own lecture notes or textbooks while preparing for an exam. Based on a decade of studies on the embodied nature of science lectures, the purpose of this article is to articulate and exemplify a different way of understanding physics lectures. We exhibit how there is more to lectures than the talk plus notes. This informational “more” may explain (part of) the gap between students’ participative understanding that exists in the situation where they sit in the lecture on the one hand and the one where they study for an exam from their lecture notes on the other. Our results suggest that in lectures, concepts are heterogeneous performances in which meaning is synonymous with the synergistic and irreducible transactions of many different communicative modes, including gestures, body movements, body positions, prosody, and so forth.     

Effects of Knowledge Maps and Prior Knowledge on Recall of Science Lecture Content

The effects of three types of lecture aids on students' recall of two college-level biology lectures were compared. Students heard audiotaped lectures while viewing either knowledge maps, outlines, or lists of the key terms presented on overhead transparencies. Free-recall tests revealed that listeners with low prior knowledge of biology learned the most when knowledge maps accompanied the lecture and the least when key terms were listed. For listeners with high prior knowledge, however, the opposite was true. An analysis of recall coherence revealed that learners recalled significantly fewer fragmented facts after viewing maps or outlines than after viewing lists. Prior knowledge was a significant factor in all analyses. Results are interpreted in terms of Mayer's cognitive model of assimilation encoding.