Guided Notes in Lecture Classes

• Not a lot of research in this area but there have been a few studies, mostly by psychologists.
• Up to half of the key concepts in a lecture are not recorded in students' notes (psychology class, professor collected student notebooks at the end of class and looked for what he considered the main concepts from lecture)
• Students who study their notes before exams out perform students who study the textbook. Review of notes appears to be more important for learning than the original act of taking the notes.
• When instructors give out full notes (no blanks, not guided notes) to students the students who perform best are those who study both the instructor's notes and their own notes.
• Notes that students take themselves tend to help them to perform well on questions involving recall of facts and on questions involving synthesizing multiple ideas.

Guided Notes

• Guided notes are notes in which some information is missing (to be filled in by the student during the lecture). These could be PowerPoint slides with key terms removed, notes with diagrams in which some items in the diagram are left unlabeled or unidentified, complete notes of the concepts followed by example problems for which the student fills in the solution during lecture, etc.
• End of class surveys show students prefer guided notes to complete, instructor generated notes.
• Guided notes give students time to listen and pick up on smaller ideas rather than trying to frantically write down everything being said.
• Guided notes showing a mathematical derivation allow students to focus on the conceptual idea of the derivation and why each step makes sense. Students can write insights on their notes since the routine details are already provided.
• Students often don't know how to take notes (how to identify key concepts, how to organize their notes so that they make sense when reviewed later). Rarely are students given any guidance in note taking and rarely do students realize that they don't know how to take notes.
• Taking notes in a physics class is different than taking notes in a history class. A senior in history who is fulfilling a science requirement might suddenly find note taking very difficult.
• The idea of guided notes could also be applied to textbook reading outside of class. Provide students with a set of guided notes to be filled in as they read the textbook before class.