Note-taking Practices Research Articles

CONCEPTUAL MODELS OF LECTURE LEARNING: GUIDING METAPHORS AND MODEL-APPROPRIATE NOTETAKING PRACTICES

The metaphors that college students use to describe lecture learning may reflect conceptual models that direct, organize, and constrain the nature of the notetaking practices they prefer to use. Specific notetaking practices that would be dictated by the metaphors of "Sponge," "Tape Recorder," "Stenographer," "Code Breaker," "Reporter," and "Explorer" were rated as to frequency of use by 84 college students in an introductory psychology class. Subsequent ratings of the adequacy of each metaphor by these students were used to predict preferences for metaphor-appropriate notetaking practices in individual stepwise regression analyses. The perceived quality of a notetaking metaphor was predictive of the metaphor-appropriate notetaking practices reported by students for every metaphor except the Explorer metaphor. The discussion focuses on the role that students' conceptual models of lecture learning might play in facilitating or hindering efforts to improve their notetaking practices. The importance of assessing conceptual models as well as specific behavioral practices in the diagnosis of lecture-learning difficulties and the evaluation of training interventions is also considered.

Taking it down: Notetaking practices of L1 and L2 students

Research into lecture notetaking has traditionally focussed on its twin functions of encoding and storing lecture information, and its value has been judged in terms of performance on specially designed tests. Rarely have the notes taken by (L1) students been systematically investigated as objects of interest. Since the 1980s. some researchers have begun to examine L2 students' notes, but these, like the L1 studies, have often been based on unreal situations lacking in content and task meaningfulness. With the exception of Dunkel's work, the literature has not offered a cross-cultural focus on the lecture notetaking of groups of L1 and L2 students. In the current study, L1 and L2 student notes from a Commercial Law lecture were examined to determine firstly what, if any, differences were observable in the recording of the hierarchical structure of the lecture. It was found that L2 students recorded significantly fewer of these top-level elements. Future research may usefully be directed towards subject-specific and cross-disciplinary explorations of L1 and L2 notetaking in conjunction with authentic lectures.

Student note-taking related to university examination performance

Student note-taking is an almost universal activity among university students, yet few naturalistic studies have examined relationships between note-taking practices and subsequent examination performance. Complete sets of notes on an introductory psychology course, involving 75 lectures presented by ten instructors, were obtained from nineteen male and nineteen female students. Notes on ten selected lectures (one per instructor) were analysed, and information derived about class attendance and the quantity, organization, and presentation of the notes. Variables based on this information were then correlated with performance on two three-hour final examination papers (one multiple-choice, one essay). High correlations were found between the quantity of notes and examination performance. Surprisingly, these correlations increased in subsamples consisting of those students who attended class most diligently. The correlations involving the multiple-choice examination tended to be higher than those involving the essay examination, most probably because of wider sampling of lecture content and a more factual orientation in the multiple-choice examination. The results appear to conflict with the advice given in student study guides, many of which suggest that students should be very selective and concise in their note-taking.

Note-Taking Practice

Journal Article Note-Taking Practice Get access M. Berman M. Berman Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar ELT Journal, Volume 34, Issue 1, October 1979, Pages 39–40, https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/34.1.39 Published: 01 October 1979