Structured Notetaking and Student Performance in Microeconomics Courses

Abstract

Notetaking is a vital component of student learning and perhaps even more critical in the recent emergence of e-learning settings. The conventional literature proposes notetaking increases student attention, provides students an external source of knowledge, and gives students the ability to encode learned material into a form most digestible to them. We utilize a framed field experiment to investigate whether training students in a structured notetaking method improves the quality of students’ notes and their performance on assessments in two Principles of Microeconomics courses in Spring 2019. We find in t-tests, ordinary least squares regressions, and fixed effects estimations that training in structured notetaking positively correlates with both the quality of student’s notes and their performance on course assessments.