Interactive Lecturing

CHAPTER 18Taking Notes

Researchers have been examining the relationship between note-taking during lectures and student learning for nearly one hundred years. In 1925, Crawford sought to verify his observation that taking notes appeared to improve college students' quiz grades and found that taking notes was better than not, reviewing notes was critical to success, and organizing notes contributed to improved test performance. Over subsequent decades, researchers have verified these early findings in myriad ways, most often designing studies that fall along two different tracks related to the functions of notes. The first type of studies looks at the encoding function of notes: in what ways does having students translate and synthesize information ...