Sometimes I encounter an educational idea that conflicts with the way I have learned to think about things. I then assume it is my duty to explain why – in a nice way.
Sketch Notes (search online) as I understand the proposal suggests that students can learn from presentations more successfully if they sketch an understanding of that presentation. The examples are always cool and integrate words, drawn figures, and arrows. I do admit that the examples created by skilled “sketchers: are nice to examine. Here is kind of a resource site provided by Kathy Schrock if you want an introduction.
Here is my problem, I studied note taking strategies as a researcher and consider related proposals from this background. One model I have always found helpful proposes that notes serve two purposes – generative and external storage. A generative active causes a processing of content and is assumed to be beneficial. If you believe you benefit because you take notes (without looking at these notes again), you believe that note taking serves a generative function for you. The external storage is obvious to most learners – we study at a point in time separated from the original presentations and our memories are flawed. The content stored externally gives us something to study.
These processes are somewhat related. What learners store during a presentation limits later study and research suggests that many learners do a poor job of representing the information they receive. Potentially an improved recording method would also improve the benefits of working with that external record.
Here is the problem. The less learners know about a topic, the more difficult it is to understand a presentation about that topic. Obvious, but important to recognize. There are also individual differences in the capacity to process information. These limitations impose demands on what cognitive types call short term memory – our awareness at any given moment. Put simply – we can only deal with so much at a given point in time and pretty much any thinking activity uses up the available capacity. Taking notes takes capacity beyond just listening. For some learners, taking notes adds an additional demand to an already overloaded cognitive system. Some students are better off not taking notes, but generating no record leads to a problem when the students attempt to review (external storage). There are solutions (this is what I studied) to this dilemma. Note taking can be simplified or eliminated and complete notes can be provided (export notes).
Here is what concerns me about sketch notes. For those students who experience the greatest difficulty processing a presentation, reducing or eliminating the complexity of note taking is important. Increasing processing demands, even if processing improves learning, are not necessarily productive in a real time environment. Sketch notes seem more complicated that recording text. I could be proven wrong, but I am aware of no research to this point that would challenge this position.
Improvements to the process of learning from presentations – Cornell note taking system, mind mapping – are part of the study rather than the encoding process. If sketch notes have a role in learning, this is where it would seem to me the techniques might be applied. The activities I mention here are really ways to re-represent recorded content (the traditional notes). The real time demands of the original presentation are no longer present and as long as the content (in memory or represented externally) are available reprocessing can lead to better understanding and retention. Sketch notes as a different way of studying may be helpful to some learners.