An Empirical Study of Lecture Note Taking among College Students

AbstractThis is one of the few quantitative studies of actual practices of college students with respect to lecture note taking. The notes on students in 12 different courses were compared with a set of "ideal" notes for each class. It was found that: one lecture heard by 161 (a) virtually all the errors in lecture note taking were errors of omission rather than errors of commission; (b) the average student failed to record nearly half the material which the lecturer did not write on the board, but missed only 12 percent of the material that was written on the board; (c) there was some evidence that course policies affected lecture note completeness; courses in which the lectures presented a great deal of new material resulted in more complete student notes than courses in which the lectures presented little new material; (d) there was a significant, positive correlation between completeness of lecture notes and course grades, but this relationship held only for the material not on die board; (e) there wa...