Note This: How to Improve Student Note Taking

The question

How much of a lesson’s content actually makes it into a listener’s notes, and what can be done about it?

The method

A literature review rather than a new study, drawing largely on Kiewra’s own experimental work: students hear or read a lesson, their notes are scored against the lesson’s ideas, and achievement is measured afterwards.

The findings

The base rate is the finding worth carrying around. “Students, on average, record just one third of important lesson ideas” [1]. That is not a matter of effort or intelligence; it is what note-taking does.

Which third you keep is the sharper point. “Students actually do a good job of recording a lesson’s superordinate main ideas but fail to record its subordinate details” [1]. Scored by level of detail, “students recorded 91% of the most superordinate level 1 ideas, 60% of level 2 ideas, 35% of level 3 ideas, and only 11% of the most subordinate, level 4 ideas” [1].

It matters because “the more complete that students’ notes are, the higher those students’ achievement” [1].

Three of the fixes generalise past the classroom. Give the listener a partial structure and capture rises from 38% to 56% of important ideas [2]. Signal the structure aloud as you go and “the cued group recorded approximately 40% more organizational points and 45% more details in notes than the uncued group” [3]. Let them hear it twice and the recovery lands precisely where the loss was: details rose from 38% after one viewing to 53% after two [4]. And typing is not a solution — “laptop and longhand note takers recorded equal amounts of lesson ideas—about one third of lesson points—but laptop notes were wordier than longhand notes and contained more verbatim strings” [5].

The limits

Every study here is a classroom study with students taking notes on a prepared lesson. A one-to-one research conversation you are steering is a different task, and the paper does not test it. The one-third figure should be read as the shape of the problem, not a measurement of your own call.

• You are deciding whether to record a Calibration Call or rely on notes. Without this paper, “I’ll take good notes” sounds sufficient. Kiewra’s numbers say notes reliably preserve the parts you already understood and lose the specifics you called to get. The specifics are the entire reason for the call.
• Recording is not an option and you have to take notes anyway. The paper says what to do about it: know the structure you are listening for beforehand, so the listening is cued rather than open, and go back over the notes immediately while retrieval can still recover what you did not write down.
• You are building a rubric out of what you heard. A note that says “they care about rigour” is a level-1 idea that survived. The level-4 idea — the actual behaviour, in the actual situation, with the actual number attached — is the one at 11%, and it is the one an interview question has to be built from.