Notetaking and highlighting were topics of research interest when I began my academic career. Because these were common activities among college students and students really had no instruction in how these activities could be most productively applied I was attracted by potential benefits of research to determine how best to perform these common behaviors. At that time, K12 students could not mark in their textbooks and while I guess students may have taken some notes they did so largely without guidance.
Questions of how best to apply digital devices has brought some of these same topics back into focus. Are notes best taken in a notebook or on a digital device? What approach to taking notes is most productive? Perhaps I am just one of those old guys characterized as focused on the good old days, but it seems to me that the rich, pragmatic research on notetaking is largely ignored by the new, active crop of researches. Since I have been writing about the potential of digital notetaking recently, I thought a few comments about the research from the ’70s and ‘80s might be helpful.
For a nice review of the notetaking research, I would recommend Kiewra (1985). Kiewra argues that researchers investigated notetaking as a process and a product. As a product, the focus was on the qualities of notes that would best serve a learner in review – typically the preparation for an examination taken weeks or months later. This became known as the external storage function. It would not be possible to listen to presentations again and it would not be practical to reread assigned readings, so what type of notes could be prepared to allow delayed study.
The process function suggested that the activity of taking notes could benefit the learner. The term encoding was typically used to describe the cognitive activity involved. The assumption was that the notes taken would involve some type of processing and this processing was more beneficial than a basic transcription of the input. I have taken to using the term generative as a broad term for the potential benefits of activities applied to information to improve retention or understanding. Perhaps it occurs to you that notetaking for external storage and to encourage deeper cognitive processing may not be the same type of notes. This is part of the challenge.
The research questions of the day were very practical. Was information from a lecture recorded in notes better recalled than ideas not contained in the notes? Was notetaking superior to just listening if retention or understanding was tested immediately (a test of the generative function)? Does the density of critical idea notes to more general notes matter?
Eventually, a secondary level of research began to emerge. Are expert notes better than personal notes? The instructor could distribute notes or have a grad students take notes and allow students to just listen. If the generative function does not work well for all (students less familiar with the content or capable as learners), perhaps having a good set of notes provided by someone else would be better. When should notes first be reviewed and could they be improved if reviewed immediately? Proposals such as Cornell notes followed from this type of question.
Some of my own thinking on the potential of digital notes follow from these questions. For example, I recommend that learners use a digital notetaking tool that records audio at the same time students are taking notes. Such tools link notes to audio with some type of invisible time stamp. When reviewing notes that are puzzling or seem incomplete, the learner can use the connection between a note and the audio to review the original input to improve the notes when a student has more time to think.
I regard the question of generative processing to be unresolved, but of potentially the greatest value. We clearly have many ways to address external storage with the opportunity for instructors to share PowerPoints slides (an external storage function) or the audio recording capabilities I have just described. The real time, generative processing may be impractical for many learners because of working memory issues related to the speed of information input. However, again, immediate review with the aid of stored original content may be a way to address this challenge. Then, learning how to take notes that involve interpretation, summarization, and personalization will be key. When and how do we teach learners to involve themselves in productive generative activities?
Kiewra, K. A. (1985). Investigating notetaking and review: A depth of processing alternative. Educational psychologist, 20(1), 23-32.
Rickards, J. P., & Friedman, F. (1978). The encoding versus the external storage hypothesis in note taking. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 3(2), 136-143.
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