July 2025 – Learning Aloud

Building Better Note-Taking Skills in Elementary and Middle School Students: Research-Backed Strategies for Educators

Note-taking is a foundational skill that supports comprehension, retention, and critical thinking. However, many students below high school age struggle to develop effective note-taking habits on their own. There is comparatively little research on the development of note-taking skills in K12 compared to higher education, and within K12, the development of note-taking skills in elementary and middle schools receives extremely little attention. Still, from typically fourth grade on, it is commonly accepted that the goal in reading skills switches from learning to read to reading to learn.

While I have always been interested in note-taking research and practice, my wife and I worked with a second-grade teacher to explore our early ideas about the creation of multimedia projects as learning opportunities. Pam Carlson, our elementary teacher colleague, was preparing her students to participate in what we called the butterfly project, in which they were learning about the life stages of butterflies, migration, and other relevant topics related to butterflies. Students were creating a HyperCard stack to share what they had learned, and each student selected a specific butterfly to describe in the card they created for the stack. In reviewing various books Pam provided students as resources, she offered the following instructions to guide the information students wrote down. When you find something you want to include, she suggested, think about that information carefully and then turn your book over so you will write down what you learned without copying from the book. I could rephrase her instructions in the way researchers would describe the goals of her required strategy (summarization, personalization, generative processing, etc.) when I taught or wrote about note-taking, but these concrete instructions still pop into my memory when I address the topic.

This post summarizes the few studies I was able to locate that I thought would be relevant to educators who work with younger students and I will try to describe what seems to me to be the implications for classroom implementation. As always, more work is needed. One basic observation that probably seems obvious to most educators, the studies I reference here, Ilter (2017), Lee et al. (2013), and Chang & Ku (2014), highlight the importance of explicit instruction and scaffolded strategies to help young learners master note-taking skills. An interesting generality about note-taking seems to be that while nearly all learners take notes in some form or another, few of any age experience direct instruction and evaluation of this important skill.

Below, you will find key recommendations from these studies to help educators guide their young students toward becoming capable note-takers.

1. Explicit and Scaffolded Instruction of Note-Taking Strategies

One of the most important takeaways from the research is that note-taking skills should not be left to chance. Ilter (2017) emphasizes the need for early and explicit instruction in note-taking, starting in elementary school. Students often lack the intuitive ability to identify key information or organize their notes effectively, so educators must provide clear guidance.

Scaffolding is a critical component of this instruction. As the word implies, scaffolds are supports offering structure. A partial outline makes a reasonable example. Teachers should begin by modeling note-taking strategies and gradually shift responsibility to students as they gain confidence. For example, early lessons might involve guided practice with teacher feedback, while later lessons encourage students to take notes independently. This gradual release of responsibility ensures that students build the skills they need to succeed on their own.

2. Writing in Their Own Words

One of the biggest challenges for young students is avoiding verbatim copying. As I previously mentioned, Pam Carlson’s strategy for her second-grade students is noteworthy. Ilter (2017) and Lee et al. (2013) stress the importance of teaching students to paraphrase information in their own words. This practice not only improves comprehension but also helps students engage more deeply with the material. A related skill was brevity. One researcher liked the label “terse”. So, the goal was not just to paraphrase, but to focus on key or interesting ideas.

To support this skill, educators can:

Model how to paraphrase by thinking aloud during lessons. A think-aloud is simply an effort to externalize your thinking. It is a common strategy suggested to help learners get a grasp on mental behaviors they cannot see.
Provide practice exercises where students rewrite sentences or paragraphs in their own words.
Emphasize the value of organizing information logically, rather than simply copying it.

By focusing on paraphrasing and organization, students can develop a more meaningful understanding of the material they are studying.

3. Guided and Partial Graphic Organizers

Lee et al. (2013) highlight the benefits of using guided notes and partial graphic organizers to support young learners. Researchers often use the label “scaffolding” to describe this strategy. The goal is to offer guidance and reduce the “cognitive load” beginners face with a new skill. These tools reduce cognitive load by helping students focus on the most important information, rather than trying to capture everything at once.

For example:

Provide students with partially completed notes that include blanks for them to fill in during a lesson.
Use written prompts to guide students in identifying main points, summarizing content, and organizing their notes.

These strategies are particularly effective for elementary students, who may struggle to process and record information simultaneously. By reducing the mental effort required, guided notes and graphic organizers allow students to concentrate on understanding the material.

4. Focusing on Key Ideas, Keywords, and Text Structures

Chang & Ku (2014) emphasize the importance of teaching students to identify and use key ideas, keywords, and text structures in their notes. Their research with 4th graders provides several practical strategies for educators:

Highlighting Main Ideas: Teach students to use titles, headings, and guiding questions to identify the most important information in a text.
Recognizing Keywords: Help students identify function words like “however,” “because,” and “therefore,” which signal relationships between ideas.
Using Visual Aids: Introduce charts, diagrams, and other visual tools to represent similarities, differences, and other relationships. For example, how are moths and butterflies the same and different?
Analyzing Text Structures: Teach students to recognize organizational patterns, such as sequences or classifications. Is the author describing the steps in a process or the characteristics of a phenomenon or concept you should list in your notes.

These strategies not only improve the quality of students’ notes but also enhance their ability to understand and retain information.

5. Practice and Feedback

Finally, practice and feedback are essential for developing strong note-taking skills. Ilter (2017) recommends providing students with ample opportunities to practice taking notes independently. This practice should be paired with regular feedback from teachers and peers to help students refine their techniques.

For example:

After a lesson, ask students to share their notes with a partner and discuss what they found most important.
Provide specific feedback on how students can improve their notes, such as by adding more keywords or organizing information more clearly.
Encourage students to revise their notes based on feedback and reflect on what they learned.

By creating a supportive environment where students can practice and receive constructive feedback, educators can help them build confidence and competence in their note-taking abilities.

The Integrated Process

Itar suggests a sequence educators can follow in working with students to develop these skills.

The Five-Step Instructional Model for Note-Taking

Ilter (2017) introduces a structured five-step approach to teaching note-taking, which can be applied to both reading and listening tasks. This model provides a clear framework for students to follow, making the process of taking notes more manageable and effective.

Step 1: Identify the Main Idea

Students should learn to highlight or underline important information and paraphrase it in their own words. Teaching them to use textual clues, such as headings or topic sentences, can help them pinpoint the main idea without resorting to verbatim copying.

Step 2: Information Reduction

Encourage students to condense paragraphs into essential points. This step helps them avoid excessive copying and focus on the most critical information.

Step 3: Keyword Identification

Teach students to recognize keywords that signal relationships between ideas, such as “because,” “however,” or “finally.” These words can help students understand the structure of the information and create meaningful connections in their notes.

Step 4: Use of Representations

Introduce visual tools like symbols, charts, diagrams, or graphic organizers to help students organize their notes. These representations make it easier to see relationships between ideas and improve recall.

Step 5: Analysis of Text Structures

Help students recognize text structures, such as headings, subheadings, sequences, and classifications. Understanding these structures allows students to organize their notes more effectively and see how different pieces of information fit together.

Summary

This post is intended as an extension of my previous posts on note-taking focused on academic settings and younger learners. Beginning in approximately fourth grade, learners both read to learn and listen to brief teacher presentations. The skills of taking notes is an important life skill seldom directly taught to learners of any age. Researchers are proposing and describing how elementary and middle school teachers can help students begin to develop these skills.

References

Chang, W., & Ku, Y. (2014). The effects of note-taking skills instruction on elementary students’ reading. The Journal of Educational Research, 108(4), 278–291.

Ilter, I. (2017). Notetaking skills instruction for development of middle school students’ notetaking performance. Psychology in the Schools, 54(6), 596-611

Lee, P., Lan, W., Hamman, D. & Hendricks, B. (2008). The effects of teaching notetaking strategies on elementary students’ science learning. Instructional Science, 36(3), 191–201.

Peer editing: Better to give than receive

I became interested in the development of writing skills through feedback focused on alternatives to the teacher or professor as editor. I worked with educators who developed writing skills and was acquainted with the time demands of providing feedback and had my own experience reviewing students’ theses and dissertations. When you have read the 200+ page dissertation of a Ph.D. candidate through a couple of drafts, you have put in some hours. I felt sorry for the English department English composition adjuncts paid a few thousand for each of 4 sections of 25 students and the time it would take to review multiple writing assignments. Still, you learn to write by writing, and feedback and rewriting in response to feedback are essential.

There are ways to provide an acceptable alternative source of feedback. Peers and now AI can critique writing, and while some more expert involvement is important, the quantity and diversity of learning activities required for skilled performance cannot consistently be monitored by instructors.

I began reviewing the research on peer editing because I was aware of the time issue faced by instructors, but also because I was interested in the role digital word processing tools could play in the feedback and revision processes. For example, Google docs offers a great way to add comments at precise locations in a document and to exchange related remarks as a document is passed back and forth between the writer and reviewer. Revision is efficient and can be explained if the editor wants to take a second look. I thought that Goodle docs offered an example of a tool that would improve the efficiency with which learners could interact with peers and then rewrite efficiently in response to comments.

As I reviewed the research literature, I came across some studies that changed my thinking on how I should advocate for peer feedback. These studies (see Cho references at the end of this post) demonstrated that peer editing also had an impact on the writing performance of the editors, and this benefit might be more important than the feedback a writer received from others. The Cho research focused on a specific population of writers generating a particular type of writing product, and understanding the focus of such research is always important in considering how and if findings might generalize to other situations. Cho focused on college students writing lab reports, i.e., the description and results of experiments performed in the lab. I know my own profession has an undergraduate course (Research Methods) with a core focus on the same type of writing task. Cho conducted several studies in which peer editing was a component. Students could either review their lab reports without feedback, with feedback, or with feedback after providing feedback on the same task to other students. The greatest difference was found when writers also provided feedback to others. When it came time to revise their own original drafts, the product they produced was judged to be superior, on average, to the products generated by those in the other groups. Moreover, statistical analysis showed that editing had a more powerful impact than having the edits of others to review.

The researchers offered two possible explanations for their findings. First, they proposed that the process of editing provides a perspective on how others might view a written product (audience effect). Writers are always told to consider their audience, but perhaps serving as the audience might provide insight into what that means for a specific written product. The other explanation involved what I would describe as a generative effect. Serving as an editor has some similarities to the research topics of writing to learn and teaching to learn. When you must externalize a position you take, this forces a concreteness and specificity you may fail to generate when just thinking about something. Having to put a position into words can lead to the understanding that you really can’t explain yourself or make you work to come up with a concrete way to express what you think.

This notion that working to improve understanding and develop proficiency seems to be raised repeatedly as educators grapple with the role AI should play in educational settings. For all of the ways AI might reduce “busy work,” there seems to be a related potential that AI provides a way to avoid the cognitive work so necessary in developing a cognitive skill. So, while AI may provide a way to provide feedback to students, there is also evidence that the work of providing feedback to others involves work that is productive both for others and for yourself. Educators face a significant challenge in communicating this reality to learners and other stakeholders.

References:

Cho, Y., & Cho, K.. 2011. Peer Reviewers Learn from Giving Comments.” Instructional Science, 39 (5), 629–643. doi:10.1007/s11251-010-9146-1

Cho, K., & MacArthur, C. (2011). Learning by reviewing. Journal of Educational Psychology, 103(1), 73-84.

Word processing: Desirable difficulty or opportunities get taken

When it comes to how we use technology, familiarity can limit analysis and exploration. I started thinking about this challenge when encountering the work of an academic who has examined the history of word processing. When I first wrote about word processing in the 1990s, the issues were similar to current topics of whether students should read from paper or screen and whether it was better to take notes on paper or on a laptop. There were comparisons of which method was more productive and efforts to account for the advantages that were identified. It was once similar with word processing. Should students learn to write on paper or using a computer? What were the advantages and disadvantages of each approach? How might the instruction of writing skills with computers be modified to take advantage of the unique capabilities of a digital approach? My thought is that many are now no longer aware of these questions and conclusions and that personal practice and instructional emphases may ignore key findings. This concern seems especially relevant given the new issues raised by the use of AI in writing and learning to write.

I decided to write again about this topic after listening to an interview with Matthew Kirschenbaum on the “This Week in Tech” network’s “Intelligent Machines” podcast focused on Kirschenbaum’s recent focus on the role of AI in writing and learning to write. The podcast guest was a member of the Modern Languages Association (MLA) panel, generating what are likely to become several influential position papers on learning to write and AI. This interview, which makes up maybe the first half hour of the podcast, is worth the attention of any educator trying to make sense of how AI will impact schools and universities. As part of the brief introduction of the podcast guest, Krischenbaum it was noted that the guest had recently written “Trach Changes: Literary History of Word Processing”.As I suggested, word processing had been a personal interest so I did purchase and read the book.

It wasn’t that the book wasn’t well written, but I did struggle to get through it. The podcast focus resulted in my misunderstanding of the topic of the book. The history of the transition from writing on paper and typewriter was of some interest, because I lived through that transition and the mention of technology hardware and software and the required skills involved in writing with a computer brought back plenty of memories. I was less interested in which noted author had made his or her transition from a notepad or typewriter to a word processor during their career. Concerns of the reading community related to how technology might influence literature likely offers similar insights into what some think about AI. A better example might be how Bob Dylan’s fans reacted when he switched from acoustic to electric guitar. What I had falsely anticipated was that the author would examine how digital storage and revision changed writing and the teaching of writing.

I imagined I would encounter an analysis of changes in personal revision, educator feedback and learner revision, peer revision, and possibly even AI as a sounding board for a writer’s efforts. These are the topics in what I see as the evolution of writing and writing education. I decided to generate a post that would offer my own thoughts about the role of word processing in the writing process. The podcast and the book on word processing are still worth your time.

Will digital tools change our writing?

I assume you complete many of the writing tasks you take on using a word processing application. Do you do this because you assume this approach makes you more efficient or do you assume this approach makes you a better writer? Maybe you have never even thought about these questions. However, when functioning as a teacher and asking your students to engage in activities in a particular way, it may be helpful to consider why the approach you expect students to use will be productive. Often, to realize the full potential of an activity, the details matter and some insight into why an approach is supposed to be productive may be helpful in understanding which details to track and emphasize. The following comments summarize some ideas about the value of word processing and of learning to write using word processing applications.

In learning, as in other areas of life, you seldom get something for nothing. Still, a logical case has been proposed for how simply working with word processing for an extended period may improve writing skills and performance. Perkins (1985) calls this the “opportunities get taken” hypothesis. The proposal works like this. Writing by hand on paper has a number of built-in limitations. Generating text this way is slow, and modifying what has been written comes at a substantial price. To produce a second or third draft requires the writer to spend a good deal of time reproducing text that was fine the first time, just to change a few things that might sound better if modified. Word processing, on the other hand, allows writers to revise at minimal cost. They can pursue an idea to see where it takes them and worry about fixing syntax and spelling later. Reworking documents from the level of fixing misspelled words to reordering the arguments in the entire presentation can be accomplished without crumpling up what has just been painstakingly written and starting over.

With word processing, writers can take risks and push their skills without worrying that they may be wasting their time. The capacity to save and load text from some form of storage makes it possible to revise earlier drafts with minimal effort. Writers can set aside what they have written to gain new perspectives, show friends a draft and ask for advice, or discuss an idea with the teacher after class, and use these experiences to improve what they wrote yesterday or last week. What we have described here are opportunities—opportunities to produce a better paper for tomorrow’s class and, over time, opportunities to learn to communicate more effectively.

Do writers take the opportunities provided by word processing programs and produce better products? The research evaluating the benefits of word processing (MacArthur, 2006; Wollscheid, Sjaastad, & Tømte, 2016) is not easy to interpret. Much seems to depend on the experience of the writer as a writer and familiarity with word processing, and on what is meant by a “better” product. If the questions refer to younger students, it also seems to depend on the instructional strategies to which the students have been exposed. It does appear that access to word processing is more beneficial for older learners and some even interpret this difference as having a neurological basis (Wollscheid, Sjaastad, & Tømte, 2016). General summaries of the research literature (e.g., MacArthur, 2006) seem to indicate that students make more revisions, write longer documents, and produce documents containing fewer errors when word processing. However, the spelling, syntactical, and grammatical errors that students tend to address and the revision activities necessary to correct them are considered less important by many interested in effective writing than changes improving document content or document organization. The natural tendency of most writers appears to be to address surface-level features.

Writers appear to bring their writing goals and habits to writing with the support of technology. Beginning writers and perhaps writers at many stages of maturity may not have the orientation or capabilities to use the full potential of word processing, and their classroom instruction may also emphasize the correction of more obvious surface errors. Thus, there are typically improvements in the products generated when working with word processing tools, but the areas in which younger writers seem to improve are not necessarily the most important ones

Many of the potential educational advantages of word processing appear only as students acquire considerable experience writing with the aid of technology and some question whether using a keyboard is better than a pencil for young writers (Wollscheid, Sjaastad, & Tømte, 2016). Perkins’s (1985) argument that writing with word processing programs will improve writing skills because word processing allows students to experiment with their writing makes sense only in situations in which students have written a great deal and experimented with expressing themselves in different ways. The fact that most research evaluating the benefits of word processing has examined performance over a short period of time, with students having limited word processing experience, thus represents a poor test of the potential of word processing (Owston, Murphy, & Wideman, 1992). Research based on a three-year study following elementary students as they learned to write with and without access to word processing opportunities has demonstrated a significant advantage for students with ready access to technology (Owston & Wideman, 1997). A recent study (Yamaç, et al., 2020) examining the benefits of consistent writing on laptops found a similar advantage in contrast to paper and pencil writing tasks for early elementary learners. These researchers point to social media activities such as blogs and multimedia writing with tablets as expanding the writing opportunities available in classrooms.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) demonstrates that in the U.S. greater experience writing with technology is predictive of schools with more proficient writers (Tate, Warschauer & Abedi, 2016). Studies such as this are still controversial as it is difficult to parse out other variables such as the income levels of the majority of students in different schools that may influence both access to technology and writing proficiency. Overall, the role of word processing in developing writing skills depends on the goals of the teacher and individual students, the social context provided for writing, and the amount of writing that students do with the assistance of word processing.

Summary

Many of the posts I write concern the cognitive processes involved in learning, thinking, and academic behavior. Often, I focus on how these processes are impacted for good or bad by involving technology. We seem to be past the point at which educators question writing on a computer, but the distinction I raised between opportunities get taken and desirable difficulty have yet to be resolved with writing. This is clearly the case when educators debate the role AI should play. My suggestions related to the opportunities get taken hypothesis should also be approached would even be that we examine whether the opportunities (often called affordances) of revision are actually employed. Do students get useful feedback from which they might learn to improve what they have written? Despite the likely benefit of revision, do students quantitatively do much revision? Perhaps like other ideals (tutoring, personalizing learning) that are impractical for one reason or another (e.g., cost, teacher time), AI might find a productive role in guiding revision experiences.

References:

MacArthur, C.A. (2006). The effects of new technologies on writing and writing processes. In C.A. MacArthur, S. Graham, & j. Fitzgerald (Eds.) Handbook of Writing Research, pps. 248-262. New York: Guilford.

Owston, R., Murphy, S., & Wideman, H. (1992). The effects of word processing on students’ writing quality and revision strategies. Research in the Teaching of English, 26 (3), 249–276.

Owston, R., & Wideman, H. (1997). Word processors and children’s writing in a high-computer-access setting. Journal of Research on Computing in Education, 30 (2), 202–220.

Perkins, D. (1985). The fingertip effect: How information-processing technology shapes thinking. Educational Researcher, 14, 11–17.

Tate, T. P., Warschauer, M., & Abedi, J. (2016). The effects of prior computer use on computer-based writing: the 2011 NAEP writing assessment. Computers & Education, 101, 115-131.

Wollscheid, S., Sjaastad, J., & Tømte, C. (2016). The impact of digital devices vs. Pen (cil) and paper on primary school students’ writing skills–A research review. Computers & Education, 95, 19-35.

Yamaç, A., Öztürk, E., & Mutlu, N. (2020). Effect of digital writing instruction with tablets on primary school students’ writing performance and writing knowledge. Computers & Education, 157, 1-19.