Acquiring Effective Notetaking Skills

Acquiring Effective Notetaking Skills: An Alternative to Professional NotetakingAuthor(s): Kenneth A. KiewraReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of Reading, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Jan., 1984), pp. 299-302Published by: International Reading AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40029340 .Accessed: 14/01/2013 22:47

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Acquiring effective notetaking skills:

An alternative to professional

notetaking

Kenneth A. Kiewra

Kiewra teaches educational psychology in the Department of Administra- tion and Foundations at Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas.

Professional notetaking services have infiltrated universities and colleges across the U.S., according to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal (Dolan, 1982). For about $10 a student can receive all of the lecture notes for a particular course, taken by seniors or graduate students employed by the notetaking services.

To my knowledge, the effficacy of hiring a professional to record notes has not been studied formally. While this relatively new area awaits inves- tigation, related research from the area of notetaking suggests that acquiring professionally derived notes can be beneficial (when they are used appropriately), but that acquiring effective notetaking skills is still important for achieving academic success.

The following is both a summary of the notetaking research germane to the relative advantages of professional and personal notetaking and implications for students in respect to notetaking. Reading professionals could well share this information with students in any course that involves teaching notetaking.

Who benefits from what notes Hiring a professional notetaker may be a good idea for several reasons. Externally provided notes can be helpful when material in the class is presented rapidly, in which case notetaking can actually be a hindrance (Aiken, Thomas, and Shennum, 1975; Peters, 1972) or when students are physically incapacitated, of relatively low ability (Peters, 1972), or incom- plete notetakers.

299


Indeed, students are notoriously poor notetakers. Research indicates that freshmen may record as few as 11% of the critical lecture ideas (Hartley and Marshall, 1974), while upper level "A" students may record only about 62% of the key ideas (Locke, 1977).

Not only do students capture a relatively small portion of a lecture's main ideas, but they fail to expound upon those notions. In a recent study, Kiewra (in press a) found that students, on the average, used only about 5 words to express a critical idea. Furthermore, these learners recorded an average of only 3 to 11 words per minute during the 50- minute lecture.

The completeness of notes is related to achievement. Students who take more notes achieve more than do students who record fewer or briefer notes (Crawford, 1925; Fisher and Harris, 1973, Locke, 1977). Similarly, when notes are provided for the learner rather than personally recorded, reviewing those which are more complete is associated with higher achievement (Collingwood and Hughes, 1978). Thus, the benefit of professional notes depends, in part, on their quality.

Experimental studies which com- pare the relative value of taking and reviewing one's own notes versus listening to the lecture and reviewing a set of notes provided by the instructor favor the latter method when the exam is delayed (Kiewra, 1983; Masquid, 1980). The instructor's notes generally provide a better means of external storage because they are more complete than the terse notes that students generally record (Kiewra, 1983; Kiewra and Fletcher, 1983).

While it is true that simply listening to a lecture and subsequently reviewing notes provided by a competent

300 Journal of Reading January 1984

notetaker is an effective learning strategy, it is not necessarily the best. Students recall proportionally more of their personal notes than notes which are externally provided (Thomas, 1978), and students who review both personal notes and the instructor's notes achieve more than do learners who review one or the other (Annis and Davis, 1975).

Good advice for notetakers The above show that it would be unwise for students either to skip classes or to refrain from notetaking in favor of hiring a professional notetaker. Instead, they should heed the following six suggestions.

Go to class. Theoretically, with- out hearing the lecture the student will probably not have the prior knowledge or cognitive framework necessary to assimilate the externally provided notes (Ausubel, 1968).

Take many notes. Not only is there a significant relationship between note completeness and achievement, but research indicates that students who are not permitted to review their notes will recall from 34 to 78% of any information they recorded but only from 5 to 34% of information they didn't record (Howe, 1970; Kiewra, in press b). The benefits of notetaking per se probably result from greater attention to the information which is noted or to a deeper processing of the recorded lecture content (Bretzing and Kulhavy, 1979; Kiewra and Fletcher, 1983; Peper and Mayer, 1978).

Take paraphrase or summary notes. Although it is important to capture certain lecture details, notes should generally be paraphrases of the lecture rather than verbatim ac- counts (Bretzing and Kulhavy, 1979). Paraphrases serve a reconstruction function (Rickards and Friedman, 1978) in that they help learners to


construct factual information that was originally unnoted (Kiewra and Fletcher, 1983). Thus deeper processing at the time of acquisition or encoding leads to higher achievement on both factual and higherordertests (Kiewra and Fletcher, 1983).

Revise your notes following the lecture. Revision entails first filling in the omissions or gaps in your notes and then personally integrating the lecture content. To integrate, the learner filters out the key ideas, actually relating them to one another and to previous knowledge. Active integration organizes ideas in memory and facilitates retrieval (Tulving and Thomson, 1973).

The deeper processing or integration of notes is probably best left for after the lecture when there is sufficient time to discern relationships or implications. Taking relational notes during a lecture can interfere (Kiewra and Fletcher, 1983).

Review your notes. Theoretically, learners must process information at deeper levels of abstraction to encode the information into long-term memory (Craik and Lockhart, 1972) and to answer higher order questions effec- tively (Morris, Bransford, and Franks, 1977). When students reorganize their notes rather than simply list ideas or study in traditional ways, they recall relatively more information on free recall exams (Kiewra, in press c; Shimmerick and Nolan, 1976).

Incorporate the externally provided notes in your review. Reviewing externally provided notes in conjunc- tion with personal notes can be the optimal study method if notes are complete, if sufficient time is used for review (Kiewra, 1983; Masquid, 1980), and if students attempt to process the information at deeper levels of abstraction by integrating and reorgan- izing noted information.

References Aiken, Edwin G., Gary S. Thomas, and William A.

Shennum. "Memory for a Lecture: Effects of Notes, Lecture Rate, and Informational Density." Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 67 (June 1975), pp. 439-44.

Annis, Linda S., and J. Davis. "Effects of Encoding and an External Memory Device on Notetaking." Journal of Experimental Education, vol. 44 (1975), pp. 44-46.

Ausubel, David P. Educational Psychology: A Cognitive View, New York, N.Y.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968.

Bretzing, Burke H., and Raymond W. Kulhavy. "Note- taking and Depth of Processing." Contemporary Educational Psychology, vol. 4 (1979), pp. 145-53.

Collingwood, Vaughan, and David C. Hughes. "Effects of Three Types of University Lecture Notes on Student Achievement." Journal of Educational Psy- chology, vol. 70 (April 1978), pp. 175-79.

Craik, Fergus M., and Robert S. Lockhart. "Levels of Processing: A Framework for Memory Research." Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, vol. 11 (1972), pp. 671-84.

Crawford, C.C. "The Correlation between Lecture Notes and Quiz Papers." Journal of Educational Research, vol. 12 (1925), pp. 282-91.

Dolan, C. "At Some Colleges, Students Profit by Sparing Others from Scribbling." The WaJI Street Journal, vol. 20 sec. 2 (October 1982), p. 35(E).

Fisher, Judith L, and Mary B. Harris. "Effect of Note Taking and Review on Recall." Journal of Education- al Psychology, vol. 65 (December 1973), pp. 321-25.

Hartley, James, and Susan Marshall. On Notes and Notetaking." Universities Quarterly, vol. 28 (1974), pp. 225-35.

Howe, Michael J. "Notetaking Strategy, Review and Long-term Retention of Verbal Information." Journal of Educational Research, vol. 63 (1970), p. 285.

Kiewra, Kenneth A. "Implications for Notetaking Based on Relationships between Notetaking Variables and Achievement Measures." Reading Improvement, in press a.

Kiewra, Kenneth A. "The Process of Review: A Levels of Processing Approach." Contemporary Educational Psychology, in press c.

Kiewra, Kenneth A. "The Relationship between Note- taking Over an Extended Period and Actual Course- Related Achievement." College Student Journal, in press b.

Kiewra, Kenneth A. Students Notetaking benaviors and the Efficacy of Providing the Instructor's Notes for Review." Unpublished manuscript. Manhattan, Kan.: Kansas State University, 1983.

Kiewra, Kenneth A., and Harold J. Fletcher. "A Levels of Processing Approach for Determining the Relation- ship between Note Encoding and Achievement." Paper presented to the Southwest Psychological Association, San Antonio, Tex., 1983.

Locke, Edwin A. "An Empirical Study of Lecture Note Taking among College Students." Journal of Educa- tional Research, vol.71 (November/December 1977), pp. 93-99.

Masquid, M. "Effects of Personal Lecture Notes and Teacher Notes on Recall of University Students." British Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 50 (1980), pp. 289-94.

Morris, C. Donald, John D. Bransford, and Jeffrey J. Franks. "Levels of Processing Versus Transfer Appropriate Processing." Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, vol. 16 (October 1977), pp. 519- 33.

Peper, Richard J., and Richard E. Mayer. "Notetaking a Generative Activity." Journal of Educational Psy- chology, vol. 70 (August 1978), pp. 514-22.

Peters, Donald L. "Effects of Note Taking and Rate of Presentation on Short-Term Objective Test Perfor- mance." Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 63 (June 1972), pp. 276-80.

Rickards, John P., and Frank Friedman. "The Encoding Versus the External Storage Hypothesis in Note- taking." Contemporary Educational Psychology, vol. 3 (1978), pp. 136-43.

Acquiring effective notetaking skills 301


Shimmerick, Susan M., and John D. Nolan. "Reorgan- ization and the Recall of Prose." Journal of Educa- tional Psychology, vol. 68 (December 1976), pp. 779- 86.

Thomas, Gary S. "Use of Students' Notes and Lecture Summaries as Study Guides for Recall." Journal of

Educational Research, vol. 71 (July/August 1978), pp. 316-19.

Tulving, E., and D.M. Thomson. "Encoding Specificity and Retrieval Processes in Episodic Memory." Psychological Review, vol. 80 (1973), pp. 352-73.

Meet your advisory board Richard S. Aim is Chair of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii, where he was director of the University Reading Clinic for 14 years. His special field is language arts and he is a past president of the local IRA council. From 1964-1973 he was editor of English Journal. A former secondary and community college teacher, John J. Carney directs the graduate reading program and teaches at the University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire. He also does research in the fields of content area reading and reading for children with special needs.

"Three Bears" prose "For some time folklorists have known that European folktales are organized around themes of three parts. We have 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears;' if a character has to go through ordeals there are usually three of them; if a king has daughters he has three, and they marry three brothers; and so on. We have only really noticed recently that this organization around threes is more than just folklore. The September 1978 (Vol. 80, no. 3) issue of American Anthropologist is a good example of 'three bears' organization. On the cover the key papers are listed as follows:

The Veil of Objectivity: Prophecy, Divination, and Social Inquiry Sex, Status, and Authority in Egalitarian Society Structures, Realities, and Blind Spots

There are three papers. Each has three subsections in its title. We are not sure yet just how significant this sort of patterning is in organizing human thinking, but it is likely to be quite important.

Some time ago Toelken (1969) said that Navajo stories were organized around themes of four, not three. This would mean a potential source for confusion in interethnic communication if English speakers were organizing around threes and Athabaskans around fours." Ron Scollon and Suzanne B.K. Scollon, Narrative, Literacy and Face in Interethnic Communication: Advances in Discourse Processes, Vol. VII, Norwood, N.J.: ABLEX Publishing Corp., 1981, pp. 33-34.

302 Journal of Reading January 1 984


Article Contentsp. 299p. 300p. 301p. 302

Issue Table of ContentsJournal of Reading, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Jan., 1984), pp. 293-384Front MatterCriterion Referenced Reading Comprehension Tests: New Forms with Old Ghosts [pp. 293-298]Acquiring Effective Notetaking Skills: An Alternative to Professional Notetaking [pp. 299-302]"Three Bears" Prose [p. 302-302]Teaching Learners about Sources of Information for Answering Comprehension Questions [pp. 303-311]Gloss: Helping Students Apply Both Skills and Strategies in Reading Content Texts [pp. 312-317]Levels of Certitude for Educated Guessing in Strict Cloze Passages [pp. 318-323]An Instructional Model for Gifted Advanced Readers [pp. 324-327]A Last Chance at Literacy: Real World Reading Comes to a Job Corps Camp [pp. 328-333]Readability and Responsibility [pp. 334-338]Teletext/Videotex: The Future of the Print Media [pp. 340-344]Assessing Study Skills [pp. 346-354]Principals' Views of Their Role in the High School Reading Program [pp. 356-358]Open to SuggestionThe PREP System for Studying Text [pp. 364-365]Stump-the-Teacher: A Word Game [pp. 365-366]

ERIC/RCS: Prereading in the Content Areas [pp. 368-370]ReviewsReview: Books for Adolescents [pp. 372-375]Professional BooksReview: untitled [pp. 375-376]Review: untitled [pp. 376-378]Review: untitled [p. 378-378]

SoftwareReview: untitled [pp. 378-379]

Briefly Noted [p. 379-379]

ResearchAcademic-Vocational Schism [pp. 382-384]

Back Matter

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Acquiring Effective Notetaking Skills