Note-taking format and difficulty impact learning from instructor-provided lecture notes

Abstract

The method students use to take notes impacts how they process lecture information. The current experiment examined how the format and amount of content included in instructor-provided notes affect learning. Undergraduate students listened to a brief audio-recorded science lecture that emphasised independent facts, while using one of four note-taking guides. These guides varied in their format (outline notes, cloze notes) and level of difficulty (less-difficult, more-difficult). Outline notes included a partially complete organisational framework, promoting knowledge of relationships among concepts. Cloze notes included all lecture content with select words missing, encouraging processing of specific details. Metacognitive ratings and an objective cognitive load measure confirmed that outline note-taking was the most difficult method. However, outline notes led to higher performance than cloze notes on free recall and inference questions, and equal performance on verbatim questions. These benefits were greatest in the more-difficult outline notes condition, when less information was provided. These findings are consistent with the material-appropriate difficulty framework. Increasing note-taking difficulty was desirable, but only when the activity elicited semantic processing that complemented the type of processing afforded by the learning material.