Why Students Should Be Taking Their Own Notes

Students nowadays can be demanding about wanting the teacher’s PowerPoints, lecture notes, and other written forms of the content presented in class. And a lot of teachers are supplying those, in part trying to be responsive to students but also because many students now lack note-taking skills. If they cannot take good notes, why not help them succeed by supplying them with notes?

The problem is that the ability to take in information and make it one’s own by processing it, restructuring it, and then presenting it in a form so that it can be understood by others is one of those basic skills that is useful throughout life. If students do not have that skill to take notes, when does the skill get developed?

There is also accumulating evidence that giving students teacher-prepared notes or PowerPoint slides does not improve their performance. Students need to take notes in ways that are meaningful to them. It also helps when notes are restructured. The material presented in class is usually ordered in a linear fashion. It makes sense to re-organize them in a way that reflects the connections between ideas rather than simply the chronology of presentation.

But how do we sell students on the value of taking notes for themselves? They might be persuaded if there is evidence that doing so may improve exam scores. And that is exactly what a research paper entitled “A Note-Restructuring Intervention Increases Students’ Exam Scores” by Dov Cohen, Emily Kim, Jacinth Tan and Mary Ann Winkelmes, have shown.

The research design is clever—a good example of the kind of classroom research that teachers can conduct. Students (mostly juniors and seniors) in this large social psychology course attended a two-hour-per-week “chalk and talk” lecture. Using a random selection process, 20 percent of the class was required to submit (two days later) a note restructuring assignment that was graded. They also took a 55-question multiple-choice midterm. The hypothesis was that students would score higher on weeks in which they were randomly assigned to complete a note re-structuring assignment (as opposed to weeks in which they were not).

That hypotheses was confirmed and at an impressive level. “Students averaged 72 percent correct on questions from the week they completed a note-restructuring assignment, whereas they averaged 61 percent correct for other weeks. That is 11 raw percentage points, or the equivalent of a full grade.

Students should find out in college (as they will in life) that they do not always get what they want. They need to take their own notes and not think they are excused from doing so because they have got the teacher’s notes. Research results such as these do not preclude teachers from supplying students with written materials, maybe an outline of the day’s topic or a diagram, but we do so needing to remember that it is the process, the engagement with the material—the cognitive exercise involved in recollecting, summarizing, reorganizing and restructuring [the notes] that actually matters the most.