How Note Taking Impacts Learning

During this week’s discussion of James M. Lang’s book, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning, faculty spent quite awhile grappling with how students take notes and how to make that experience engaging and effective.

A technique Lang suggested involves providing students an outline of the lecture with certain parts removed, such as important concepts, and having them fill in the outline during the lecture. While the value of this approach was noted, faculty understood some students would find doing so less than appealing. Should students be forced into engaging this way?

The answer, of course, is “it depends.” To help parse out that vague answer, Office of Teaching & Learning staff recommend reviewing the podcast below, which summarizes the research of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014) titled The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking.

If you prefer to read the study itself, click not the following link: The Pen Is Mightier-1u7jsr9

In Notes on Note-Taking: Review of Research and Insights for Students and Instructors, Michael Friedman explains, “Note-taking is an acquired skill that improves student learning and retention of information in a variety of domains and subjects. Importantly, comprehension and production processes (which both require working memory resources) are needed simultaneously for optimal learning to occur, making effective note-taking difficult to accomplish.

He continues, “The methods of assessment for notes can be relatively subjective or inconsistent from one study to the next, which makes it difficult to uniformly capture what makes for high-quality notes. Many other aspects of note-taking such as the style or format of notes, different mediums (pen and paper, laptop, handouts), the physical setting, and the act of reviewing notes (including how those notes are reviewed) all have the ability to impact the student learning and understanding of course content. These factors need to be considered carefully by both students and instructors alike, especially given rapid advances in technology and reforms to higher education.”
Friedman’s paper is packed with tips and recommendations. Here is a link to the article: Notes on Note-Taking-qrs2kq.

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