At this time of year I am working with a lot of new students, and one of the things that I provide some guidance on is note-taking. This is, of course, very closely linked to the concepts of memory and metacognition:

• Memory, because learners need to retain some of what they study;

• Metacognition, because how they take notes depend on choices that reflect learned strategies and beliefs about learning.

I’ll share a few key ideas today in the hope that it’s relevant to your students – and perhaps also to your own reading and academic work.

Note-taking and multi-tasking

First, as we know, humans are not very good at multi-tasking. Working memory is limited, and its limited capacity means that extraneous information can harm performance.

This is a problem for note-taking, especially in classes and lectures. The live nature of a class means that students are forced to multi-task; they have to think about, reorganise and jot down information on one idea while new information is still incoming.

The problem is much reduced when students take notes in their private study time, e.g. while reading. However, they may still have bad habits (e.g. chatting or watching online videos while studying) that cause multi-tasking.

In class, teachers can allow short gaps of time for students to think about and review their notes – a strategy that was found helpful in this study.

Beliefs about note taking

The next problem is relevant to lectures especially. As students come to college/university for the first time, they may have a distorted idea of what a university lecture involves.

Many may try to note down as much as they can in the time available, writing things verbatim. Researchers tend to agree that it is preferable to aim for main ideas rather than the exact wording of lectures. In each short section of the lecture, students should try to capture the key thing that the speaker is trying to communicate.

Of course, it is sometimes important to note down specific details as well (names, results of research, etc), but the gist is often the thing that students need to retain.

Trying to make sense of new information and identify a main idea is also a form of deep processing, which can lead to better retention compared to a shallow strategy such as copying.

Noting versus listening

Given the challenges of note-taking in class, you might wonder whether students would be better off just listening intently rather than trying to take notes at all.

However, Kiewra (1991) and others have found evidence that note-taking does help people to process and make sense of new material. It also helps if learners have notes to refer to later. Each of these things (live note-taking & reviewing notes) independently benefits later assessment performance, and doing both is better still!

For this reason, it’s better to guide students on how to take notes rather than have them opt out entirely because they find it too difficult.

After the class

As mentioned above, the demands of note-taking are much reduced outside class, as students can take their time. In such situations, as long as they are wise enough to avoid multi-tasking and other distractions, they have the opportunity to engage fully with the material they are reading.

All the same, as we are probably all well aware, a problem can arise in the form of students’ choice of note-taking strategy in these contexts.

As I discussed way back in in update #23, research evidence suggests that re-reading and highlighting a text are poor strategies, meaning that there is less to be gained for a given amount of time invested.

As mentioned in the same post, mind-mapping is a popular strategy, but one that is rather time-consuming and which does not appear to be especially effective.

On the other hand, there is an argument students should organise their notes in the form of tables and diagrams (e.g., Luo & Kiewra, 2022).

One possible way to interpret this apparent contradiction is that organisation can boost understanding over the short-term, but is less effective at tackling forgetting (boosting performance but not learning; see update #89) when compared to strategies such as retrieval practice.

To resolve this, I’d still recommend that students organise new information e.g. into tables, Venn diagrams or flow charts, but that they aim for diagrams that are relatively quick to do, and see this as only the start of the process of learning the information – delayed active retrieval should be used to consolidate it.

I hope that helps. All the best for the coming week!

Jonathan

Last time: Rehabilitating Memory in Education

Please note that my slides and similar materials are shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. This means you can use or adapt them with attribution for non-commercial purposes. If you wish to use my materials for other purposes, feel free to get in touch.