Notetaking and review: The research and its implications

Notetaking and review are positively related to academic achievement, but many students record too few notes to benefit fully from these activities. This paper presents ten factors that may constrain notetaking and review, and provides corresponding implications for improving these study behaviors and for conducting further research. Some instructional implications are that students should record more extensive and conceptual notes and that instructors can help students by organizing their presentations, reducing lecture rate, pausing for notetaking, emphasizing key ideas and encouraging alternate frameworks for notetaking and review. Instructors can also facilitate learning by providing learners with notes for review and with knowledge about testing. In addition, instructors should consider the cognitive processing differences among students because certain learners are likely to find notetaking dysfunctional relative to other means of acquisition. The implications for research focus on determining the optimal notetaking and review activities.

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