Introduction

Many studies suggested that students should be taught study skills, due to the enhancing effect of the skills/strategies on learning (Schunk 2004). Some argue that it is never too early to learn organizational skills such as notetaking (Smith et al. 2000; Thomas 1993). Student-taught learning skills, including notetaking, improved their academic performance in various subject areas (Hartley 1983; Hughes and Suritsky 1994; Kiewra 1985; Ornstein 1994). Researchers also showed that a learner’s inadequate knowledge of study skills is a major reason that students encounter academic difficulty during their school years or, later, in college (Rafoth et al. 1993; Thomas 1993). Wittrock (1974) has also suggested that learning strategies and learning content knowledge are both important elements to learning outcomes. The use of a strategy during the learning process can affect the encoding process (the process of putting the information into one’s memory system), which in turn affects learning outcome and performance (Weinstein and Mayer 1986).

Notetaking has been shown as effective strategies to improve students’ learning. Abundant evidence shows that frequency and quality of notetaking are positively correlated to students’ academic performance (Baker and Lombardi 1985; Boyle 1996; Boyle and Weishaar 2001; DiVesta and Gray 1972; Fisher and Harris 1973; Hale 1983; Hartley 1983; Kiewra 1985, 1989; Shrager and Mayer 1989; Suritsky and Hughes 1996; Thomas 1993). Kiewra (1988) postulated that notetaking involves students’ “attending to the lecture, locating targets in long-term memory, holding and manipulating the attended information in working memory, encoding ideas into long-term memory, and transcribing relevant notions” (p. 41). Obviously, notetaking facilitates every phases of information processing in learning.

Although most studies in notetaking research have been focused on high school and college students (Boyle 1996, 2001), the benefits of notetaking as a learning strategy to enhance learning should not be restricted only to advanced students. Trawick-Smith (2003) suggested that children at primary schools are metacognitively capable of directing their own memory processes, organizing information, and paying attention to important information, that is, they already possess the cognitive capacities needed for notetaking. It seems reasonable to assume that notetaking should be instructed as a valuable strategy in almost any classroom setting for much younger students, even across different cultures.

Science education was chosen to be the subject-area of the study because of the increasing importance of writing activities in science learning. Baxter et al. (2001) found that science educators emphasized writing as an integrated component of science education. In their study with fifth grade students, taking notes on details of the science procedures and the results enhanced students’ recall performance and comprehension of science content. However, the study also showed the lack of thoughtful reflection, on the part of students, concerning the notes taken.

Among many formats of notetaking instruction, strategic notetaking (abbreviation one shown in Appendix, cited from Boyle and Weishaar 2001), in which written prompts were provided to guide students in catching main points, summarizing, and organizing lecture information (Boyle 1996, 2001; Boyle and Weishaar 2001), has been shown to be an effective learning tool in the classroom at college and high school level; moreover, the strategic notetaking is a useful tool in learning for both general students and those students with special needs. This technique assists students in using “metacognitive skills (i.e., organizing information and combining new information with prior knowledge) during lectures, thereby increasing their engagement during notetaking” (Boyle 2001, p.223). Boyle (1996, 2001) argued that through using metacognitive skill, students were actively engaged in the learning process, thereby enhancing their understanding of the lecture.

In addition to strategic notetaking, the partial strategy notetaking form of instruction will be introduced, which is based on the cognitive load theory (Sweller and Chandler 1991). However, the instruction of this form is similar to that of the strategic notetaking form, except that, 50% of the information will be provided on this form in advance. According to Atkinson and Shiffrin’s (1968) information processing theory, information is processed in the short-term memory, which is limited in the amount of information it can possess. When the short-term memory is overloaded, some materials are lost from short-term memory (Rafoth et al. 1993). Therefore, one way to help students jot down more information in their notes is to lessen their cognitive load, thereby allowing students more cognitive space to process lecture information (Sweller and Chandler 1991). Researchers (Katayama and Robinson 2000) believe that a primary obstacle of notetaking is the amount of cognitive overload experienced by the student.

Ausubel (1978) argues that prior knowledge is one of the most important factors affecting long-term memory storage. People who have a large body of knowledge can relate their new experiences to prior knowledge and so can more easily engage in such processes as meaningful learning and elaboration. Students who are concentrating on processing information presented during a learning task may experience cognitive overload if they are asked to take notes simultaneously, whereas students with prior knowledge in the area should be able to split their working-memory capacity between the tasks of learning and note taking. To test this hypothesis, students’ prior science achievements were measured and used as independent variables in the study. To control writing speed as a potential confounding variable, writing speed was measured and used as a covariate in the analysis.

The purpose of the study was to examine the effectiveness of strategy and partial instruction of notetaking on elementary students’ notetaking behavior and science learning and find an instructional mode for teaching notetaking for students with different levels of prior knowledge.

Methods

Participants

Participants in this study were three classes of third grade students (n = 103) randomly selected from six classes at that grade level in a school in southern rural Taiwan. The classes were randomly assigned to receive different notetaking instruction treatments. The three groups were not significantly different in their performance on the Natural Science examination conducted two months before. Median-split was used to divide students in each class in either a high or a low achievement group.

Design

This study utilized a 3 × 2 factorial design, with six experimental conditions constituted by the variable of note taking instruction (full notetaking strategic, partial notetaking strategic, and control groups) and the variable of prior knowledge (high vs. low), based on students’ performance on a Natural Science examination. Students’ writing speed was used as a covariate.

The independent variable of strategy instruction was manipulated by delivering different degrees of scaffolding in notetaking during a 4-day training session in a science class while the class watched an 11-min video-tape of astronomy. Students in the full notetaking strategy condition received a notetaking training sheet developed by Boyle (1996) in which main aspects (“Topic of the class,” “3–7 Main points of the content,” “New terminologies” and “Summary”) of the note were listed and students were instructed to fill in with information obtained from the taped lecture. Students in the partial notetaking strategy condition received a similar training sheet, with 50% of lectured information provided by the teacher and students were instructed to complete the notes. Students in the control condition did not receive any treatment.

Measurement

Effects of the independent variables were examined on four dependent variables: recall of cued information in students’ notes that had been presented to students on the blackboard during the instruction (CIU), recall of non-cued information in students’ notes that were not presented to students in oral or writing format during instruction (NCIU), performance on a test of 14 multiple choice items covering the taught content (TEST), and long-term free recall (LTFR) measuring students’ memory of concepts taught in the video-tape two days after the instruction. Students’ writing speed was measured by the number of times a student can write his/her name in one minute.

1. The CIU (cued information units) is a design to examine students’ notes on how many CIU were recorded in their notes among experimental and control groups after all groups of students watched the videotape. CIU refers to the number of the information units the teacher writes on the board before watching the tape. All the participants took notes while watching the 11-min videotape. All the notes were collected from the students and counted for the number of CIU. The total number of CIU written on the board during test session was 21. Each student gets one point for recording any one item of cued information unit in their notes. An independent rater scored all CIU, a second rater randomly selected one-third of the participants’ score sheet and scored each in the same manner as the first rater. Inter-rater reliability was calculated to be .96 for the CIU.

2. The NCIU (non-cued information units) is a design to examine students’ notes on how many NCIU were recorded in their notes among experimental and control groups after all groups of students watched the videotape. The non-cued information units (NCIU) is referred to as the number of information units orally delivered by the teacher without any emphasis, either verbally or written on the board. All the participants took notes while watching the 11-min videotape. All the notes were then collected and compared to a sequential list of the non-cued information units identified from the videotaped lecture information. The NCIU had the same amount (21 non-cued units) of information, which was delivered only once orally without being written on the board and without being emphasized by the teacher. Each student gets one point for recording any one item of non-cued information unit in their notes. An independent rater scored all NCIU measures, a second rater randomly selected one-third of the participants’ score sheet and scored each in the same manner as the first rater. Inter-rater reliability was calculated to be .95 for the NCIU.

3. There were a total of 14 comprehension questions in the Multiple-Choice Test, for “probing” students’ understanding of information presented in the videotape of “Underwater Creatures.” The questions were based on factual information presented in the videotaped lecture. According to the elementary curriculum in Taiwan, the information in the videotaped lecture was not taught to students until fourth grade. Therefore, students who participated in this study were assumed not to have knowledge of the test materials before this study was conducted. Each item was worth one point if answered correctly, so the highest possible score was 14 points on this test. The internal reliability was conducted after the results were discovered; the Cronbach alpha of .74. The face validity was obtained from two elementary school science teachers to ensure the content of the test were related to the videotaped lecture of the tape: “Underwater Creatures.” Both were satisfied with the relationship between the test and the content of the videotaped lecture. Factor analysis showed that the 14 items loaded on a single factor.

4. For Long-Term Free Recall (LTFR) Measurement, students’ long-term memorization of the lecture topic was measured by their performance on a free-recall task about the concepts presented in the videotape two days after watching the videotape. Students were provided with a blank paper for recording the concept items. They were allowed five minutes to recall. Each concept contained in the videotape that was found in the students’ recall list during the long-term recall test was counted as one point. There were a total of 63 concepts identified in the videotape of “Underwater Creatures” to generate a possible score of 63. Inter-rater reliability of the long-term free recall concept items measure was assessed. Two independent rater scores on one-third of students’ recall lists were correlated at .95.

5. The words per minute (WPM) method—participants were told to write their first name as many times as they could for one minute. This task was used to measure the writing speed when no cognitive processing is required (Hughes and Suritsky 1994). The speed at which students are able to write might have an impact on the number of ideas they are able to write in their notes (Hughes and Suritsky 1994). For this reason, writing speed was used as a covariate in data analysis.

Procedure

The two strategy instruction groups received notetaking training for four sessions, 40 min per session, during the time the students in the control group took their science course in regular classrooms. At the fifth session of the study, all students were shown a video-tape of “Underwater Creatures” and asked to take notes when watching. Students’ notes were collected and analyzed to generate the CIU and NCIU scores. The multiple-choice test was administered immediately to measure students’ learning after the video-tape was watched. Two days later, in the sixth-session, students were asked to write down the concepts they remembered from watching the video-tape, data which were used as the measure of LTFR.

Training sessions

One 11-min videotaped lecture was administered to the two experimental groups during the four training sessions. The first videotape, “Astronomy” was used as a model for notetaking. Students were requested to take notes when watching the tape, then compare their notes with the instructor’s and identify differences between the two. For sessions one through four, the instructor designed a training schedule for both experimental groups to help participants familiarize themselves with the strategic notetaking form. The instructor explained the reason for using it, when to use it, where to use it, and how to use it. Students kept practicing their specific notetaking form during the four training sessions.

Test session

The fifth session was the evaluation session, which was utilized to test notetaking behavior of all participants. In this session participants watched videotape “Underwater Creatures.” The notes students took while watching the 11-min long videotape were collected to generate measures of CIU and NCIU.

After watching the taped lecture, the participants were allowed another 11 min to review their notes, and then they were requested to take a comprehensive multiple-choice test related to the videotaped lecture. Students were allowed 10 min to complete 14-item multiple-choice questions.

Two days later, at the sixth session, each group of students were administered a long-term free recall test in which students were requested to recall the topic-related concept items that they could remember from the videotape which they had watched two days before. They were then asked to write their answers. Students were told to finish this exercise in five minutes. The students’ recalled information yielded the measure of the long-term free recall score.

Results

Nine students were excluded from the sample because of the incompletion of the training or being classified as having learning disabilities, and one outlier was detected. The final sample contained 93 participants. In addition, the scored NCIU were transformed to NCIU_LOG to meet the assumption of normality of distribution.

The descriptive statistics of the dependent variables (CIU, NCIU, TEST, and CONCEPT) grouped by the independent variables of treatment and prior knowledge, including means, and standard deviation are shown in Table 1. Medium correlation was observed among the dependent variables and between the dependent variables and the covariate, which justified the use of MANCOVA. A two-way multivariate analysis of variance with covariate was conducted to determine the effect of the three types of notetaking (control, strategic, partial strategic) strategies, two level of prior knowledge (high vs. low), on the four dependent variables (CIU, NCIU, TEST, and CONCEPT), with students’ writing speed as the covariate. The analysis showed a significant prior achievement effect, Wilks’s λ = .825, F (4, 84) = 4.46, p = .003, and a significant treatment effect, Wilks’s λ = .642, F (8,168) = 5.21, p = .000. The interaction effect between the prior achievement and treatment was not significant.

Table 1 The means, standard deviation, and numbers of participants on dependant variables for the three treatments and two prior knowledge groups
Full size table

Following the significant prior achievement main effect in the multivariate analysis, univariate follow-up analysis on each dependent variables revealed that students with different levels of prior achievement performed differently on CIU, F(1,87) = 8.75, p < .01, η2 = .09; and on long-term free recall, F(1, 87) = 14.74, p = .000, η2 = .15. All differences were in favor of the students with higher prior achievement in sciences. Means of CIU were 6.19 and 8.43 for the low and high prior achievement groups, respectively. Means of LTFR were 4.74 and 7.41 for the two groups, respectively.

Univariate analyses, as follow-ups for the significant treatment main effect in the multivariate analysis, showed significant treatment effect on the dependent variables of CIU, F(2, 87) = 4.52, p = .01, η2 = .09, and NCIU_LOG, F(2,87) = 17.34, p < .001, η2 = .28. Post-hoc pairwise comparisons on CIU showed the full notetaking strategy group (M = 8.82) outperformed the control groups (M = 6.14) on the task. Post-hoc pairwise comparisons on NCIU_LOG showed the two strategy instruction groups, with means of .31 and .34 for the full and partial instruction group, respectively, performed significantly better than the control group (M = .04).

Discussion

Compared to the control group, the full and partial notetaking strategic groups took more notes as measured by cued information units (CIU) and non-cued information units (NCIU). The finding carries significant theoretical implications. Advocates of strategy instruction contend that after a learner successfully learns a skill, he or she will face a variety of other tasks and situations where the skill is demanded. Since it is difficult, if not impossible, for the learners to learn all of these eventualities, teachers should teach students learning strategies so that the learner can generalize the strategies to accommodate potential future demands (Singer et al. 1985). However, whether this type of general transfer can occur has been the subject of much debate over years. Although research clearly shows that general transfer is much less common than specific transfer, recent studies have also shown effective study methods and habits can be taught and may be expected to be generalized from one subject matter to another (Brooks and Dansereau 1987; Hughes and Schumaker 1991; Hutchinson 1993, 1996; Pressley et al. 1987). This study provides supportive evidence that, when planned well, learning strategies, such as notetaking, can be taught to students as young as nine years old.

Practically, this study demonstrated a potential to improve students’ learning by teaching effective studying strategies. As indicated in the variable of long-term free recall (LTFR), the strategy instruction groups had better memory of information taught two days before than the control group had. The difference in the performance can be attributed to the fact that the two experimental groups were asked to take notes when studying. Self-regulated learning researchers have identified many effective learning strategies, among them are “the most widely studied” (Zimmerman 1998, p. 75) strategies of goal setting, task strategies, imagery, self-instruction, time management, self-monitoring, self-evaluation, self-consequences, environmental structuring, and help seeking. It is encouraging to think how much students will benefit if the strategies are taught regularly and systematically in classrooms.

In the past, students in the third grade were generally considered too young to take notes during class lectures. Pressley and McCormick (1995) suggested that young students need to be prompted to use good learning strategies. The strategic and partial strategic notetaking forms include written prompts that function to remind students to engage in effective step by step notetaking activities.

In this study, the researcher found that third grade students can be trained to take relatively complete notes by using notetaking forms that include writing prompts, especially the strategic and partial notetaking forms. As previously mentioned, the completeness of students’ notes is strongly related to students’ academic performance (Baker and Lombardi 1985; Einstein et al. 1985; Kiewra and Fletcher 1984); therefore, one can be confident that these students who received notetaking training will perform better than the non-notetaking group in the future.

However, as previously discussed, even the students had higher prior knowledge experienced difficulty in taking notes on non-cued information units from the lecturer. This reflects that these young children need more oral (teacher emphasizing the importance of information) or physical (writing on the board) prompts in order to take the most important information down in their notebooks. Therefore, it is important for teachers to recognize that young students always need to be reminded to take notes on important lecture information.

Overall, children seemed to have great potential in applying the notetaking learning strategy. Future studies, however, might focus on the ways that different content areas might show different results. In addition, the lecture speed of the classroom teacher might reasonably be assumed to have some influence on the completeness of students’ notes. Therefore, a reasonable classroom teachers’ lecture rate for different native language students may also be a topic of interest to researchers. Those interested in generalization of the results of this notetaking training program should be encouraged to be aware of the students’ environment, such as the characteristics of participants, the suburban area of school types, and the teachers’ classroom instruction. In addition, the readers also should be aware of how to use this information for other content areas.

Contrary to our prediction, there were no interaction effect between the treatments and prior knowledge. The researcher expected that students’ with low prior science achievement might need more scaffolding in notetaking than those with higher prior achievement so that the partial notetaking strategy instruction would benefit students with lower achievement more than the full strategy instruction. We still believe the rationale behind the prediction and hope future research will examine the relationship between ability/achievement and method of strategy instruction.