I recently read a research article (Cohen and colleagues, 2013) about students notetaking in college lectures that included interesting observations about the challenges students face. First, information comes at students quickly and to decide what to record and then manually recording what is selected is very demanding preventing little more than getting something down on paper or screen. The second challenge was what I found most interesting. The researchers proposed that students experience a linear flow of information that does not contain much of the structure of what the instructor is trying to communicate. The article proposed that students must try to create a structure after they leave the lecture hall and proposed one approach for doing so.
This comment got me thinking about a more general model of learning from textbooks and presentations. Lecturers and authors must generate a product that is experienced linearly – i.e., presentations and books. With the exception of headings and subheadings in written material, content creators have a structure in mind that guides the creation of what they produce, but is difficult to share. I read elsewhere a suggestion that a presentation should flow from an outline and the presenter should refer back to the outline from time to time to try to communicate this structure.
Thinking about the process perhaps at an even deeper level, I came up with the following representation. By increasing the complexity a bit, it might be possible to identify points of intervention.
So, this graphic is intended to suggest that the knowledge of a content creator is present is a cognitive network. To create a practical product for communication, the content creator has to transform aspects of this knowledge network into a hierarchically focused structure. I think an outline (physical or conceptual) is a good way to understand this transition step. This structured representation is then transformed into a linear representation that is shared in one way or another with an audience. As I suggested, a physical form of this outline may also be shared in some cases (the outline itself, or headings and subheadings). The learner then processes this input and from this processing, perhaps consisting of several steps, attempts to generate their own network of personal understanding.
The initial notetaking or perhaps highlighting would be a basic process and perhaps many students decide this will be sufficient. However, those who propose study skill or personal knowledge management strategies focus on what other activities might be added to improve retention and understanding.
What other activities can be added to recreate the structure intended by the content creator or formed in a more personalized way by the learner? Some of these “post-processing” activities may be familiar. For example, creating concept maps, sketchnoting, the left-hand column and summary of Cornell notes, and the proposal that students take class notes on the left-hand page or their notebook and save the right-hand page for follow-up recollections and additions would fit. All of these tactics involve at least basic connections if not hierarchical relationships.
For those interested in translating the processing of information from the perspective of personal knowledge management. You can substitute a “smart note” for a node in the concept map strategy and consider the similarity of links created among notes by tags and forward and backward links. The sharing of this structure as Obsidian makes possible with Obsidian Publish offers a way to share both information and more complex structure as externalized by a content creator.
I have a book club colleague, History Professor Dan Alosso, who is building something like this for his U.S. History class. The idea is not to replace lectures but to offer related content as organized by the lecturer. Dan writes and offers videos through Substack.
So, what are the points of intervention I mentioned? Certainly, study strategy advocates have many ideas about what processing stage of the model I suggest. The sharing of a structure during or after the exposure of students to content is less frequently explored.
Reference
Cohen, D., Kim, E., Tan, J., & Winkelmes, M. A. (2013). A Note-Restructuring Intervention Increases Students’ Exam Scores. College Teaching, 61(3), 95-99.
