Review and Process Effects of Spontaneous Note-Taking on Text Comprehension

Contemporary Educational Psychology 24, 1–20 (1999)Article ID ceps.1998.0980, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

Review and Process Effects of Spontaneous Note-Takingon Text Comprehension

Virpi Slotte and Kirsti Lonka

University of Helsinki, Finland

This study examines how quantitative and qualitative differences in spontane-ously taken notes are related to text comprehension in combination with reviewingor not reviewing previously made notes. High school graduates (N 5 226) wereallowed to take notes in any way they desired while reading a philosophical text.Approximately half the participants were told that they could review their notesduring writing tasks designed to measure the ability to define, compare, and evaluatetext content. The other half of the participants answered the subsequent questionswithout their notes. The process of taking notes was rated on the basis of notequality and quantity. The results revealed significant review and process effects inspontaneous note-taking. Reviewing the notes during essay-writing generally re-sulted in good performance in an exam calling for deep-level text comprehension.However, this review effect was mainly limited to detailed learning instead of mak-ing one’s own inferences. Results pertaining to note quality indicated that the partici-pants who summarized the content of the text resulted in better performance in alltasks in comparison with those who produced notes following the text order orverbatim notes. The amount of note-taking was also positively related to text com-prehension. The discussion focuses upon the situational appropriateness of note-taking effects that pose challenges to educators. 1999 Academic Press

Most students take notes while attending lectures. However, students leftto their own devices produce notes that are incompletely and ineffectivelyorganized (e.g., Kiewra, Benton, Kim, Risch, & Christensen, 1995) and thatmay not enhance learning. It seems that the main reason for lecture note-taking is in many cases to record the content of the lecture. It is not surprisingthat the usefulness of lecture notes is very much based on the opportunityto review them later.

This research was funded by the University of Helsinki. We gratefully acknowledge thecomments of Dr. Erkki Komulainen on a previous version of this manuscript, and we thankMs. Sisko Seppa for collecting data and Ms. Mervi Melametsa for scoring the data. We arealso very grateful to Mrs. Sari Lindblom-Ylanne, who has been actively involved in designingthe conceptual framework for the Learning-from-text test.

Address correspondence and reprint requests to Virpi Slotte, Development and ResearchUnit, Learning Centre, P.O. Box 61, 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland. E-mail:[email protected].

10361-476X/99 $30.00

Copyright 1999 by Academic PressAll rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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The intention in taking notes while reading a text may be quite differentfrom lecture note-taking. There is less need to record the contents of the textwhen the intention is to learn by writing. Learning from text also allows oneto proceed at one’s own pace. That is, while lecture note-taking simulta-neously requires listening, selecting important ideas, and recording notes;text-noting allows dialectical processes in reading and writing. In short, boththe intentions and functions of note-taking vary in these two situations.

Further, the notes students spontaneously take while they study for anexam may be quite different from those produced in experiments. Our previ-ous research showed that the quality of spontaneously constructed notes hadan effect on the learning outcomes even if students were not given a chance toreview them (Lonka, Lindblom-Ylanne, & Maury, 1994; Lahtinen, Lonka, &Lindblom-Ylanne, 1997). Concept maps or summaries were related to suc-cess in tasks calling for deep-level text comprehension, whereas verbatimcopying was less useful. The results were interpreted in terms of mentalrepresentations that were formed by different study tactics. It seemed veryrare that subjects would use a note-taking tactic they had never tried before;thus the tendency to spontaneously construct certain kinds of notes seemsquite stable, and experimenter-imposed tactics may remain artificial.

What kind of spontaneous notes are useful in learning from text? Are thenotes as useful when there is no possibility of reviewing them? Further, whatkind of note-taking is effective in qualitatively different learning tasks? Toanswer these questions, this study investigates natural note-taking activitythat high school graduates use while reading unfamiliar text in a motivatingsituation, i.e., in an examination taken for admission to a nursing school.The intention is specifically to assess the effect of spontaneous note-takingactivities in an exam designed to measure detailed learning, the ability tolearn the main ideas from a text, and the ability to review knowledge criti-cally.

THE EFFECT OF PROCESSING NOTESON LEARNING OUTCOMES

The theoretical notion of mental representations draws connections be-tween constructivist activities in text processing and the quality of learningoutcomes. In their strategic discourse processing theory, van Dijk andKintsch (1983) differentiated three levels of mental representations that maybe constructed during reading: the surface structure for actual words andphrases, the textbase for the semantic content and rhetorical structure, andthe situation model, in which the text content has been elaborated by infer-ences from the reader’s own prior knowledge. These different mental repre-sentations correspond to different levels of text-processing ranging from asuperficial processing to a deeper-level understanding (Kintsch, 1994;Kintsch & Kintsch, 1996; Lonka et al., 1994; Schnotz, 1996).

SPONTANEOUS NOTE-TAKING 3

Our previous research suggests that in spontaneous note-taking summariz-ing and using other methods which require the elaboration from words tomeaning units in one’s own words leads to a deeper-level mental representa-tion than copying, verbatim notes, or underlining text (Lonka et al., 1994;Lahtinen et al., 1997; Slotte & Lonka, in press). By ‘‘verbatim notes’’ wemean notes in which key words, phrases, or sentences are copied directlyfrom the text without relating them to each other.

In other studies where note quality has been examined, outlines or two-dimensional formats have improved learning from text (e.g., Robinson &Kiewra, 1995; Robinson & Schraw, 1994), whereas conventional notes,taken in the students’ ordinary way, have generally resulted in poorer per-formance (Kiewra et al., 1995). Conventional notes were also found to con-tain fewer idea units than two-dimensional representations (Kiewra et al.,1991).

According to the results described above, the activity of note-taking itself(its encoding function) is useful in knowledge acquisition. Summary notesmay also enable students to carry out deep-level transformation of knowl-edge (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987), in contrast to note-taking that aimsdirectly at the reproduction of the learning material (Kiewra et al., 1991).The notes that contain only the information exactly expressed in the textmay well be suited for recalling what the text says, but they will not easilyreveal the connections between the newly learned information and other anal-ogous situations (Kintsch & Kintsch, 1996).

In addition to a qualitative dimension based on the formation of internalconnections, Kiewra and his colleagues (Kiewra et al., 1995) have also dis-tinguished the process of recording notes along their quantitative dimension.Research on the quantitative dimension based on the note completeness indi-cates that the number of idea units in lecture notes is positively related totest performance (Kiewra & Benton, 1988; Kiewra et al., 1995). Benton etal. (1993) also presented data consistent with the conclusion that the lengthof lecture notes was related to both quantitative and qualitative measures ofessay writing.

In investigating college students’ lecture note-taking activity, Van Meter,Yokoi, and Pressley (1994) found that students sometimes used verbatimnote-taking as a result of deep processing. They stated that the students pro-cessed the material deeply enough to recognize that it might be confusinglater if notes were paraphrased rather than copied exactly. However, thistended to happen mostly when course material was specific or when testsrequired exact memory. Another situational aspect that might affect the levelof note-taking processes is text familiarity (Mannes, 1994; McNamara,Kintsch, Songer, & Kintsch, 1996). Peper & Mayer (1986) suggested thatnote-taking is most likely to facilitate processing of unfamiliar information.Wade and Trathen (1989) claim that sensitivity to the use of more active

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ways of studying is crucial in learning not only with more difficult but alsowith sufficiently long materials.

The idea in this study was, as often in the actual learning situation, thatthe subjects would not have time to learn the whole text by heart, but wouldhave to concentrate on understanding the essentials. In an educational settingtoo, understanding the core meaning should be the focus of the evaluationsrather than recalling individual details.

REVIEWING NOTES

The advantages of reviewing notes are assumed to be based on their exter-nal memory function. It is clear, however, that the benefits from reviewingthe notes depend essentially on note completeness as well as on the assess-ment of learning. Reviewing relevant notes presumably contributes more torecall than knowledge application (e.g., using the text information in novelsituations) because having notes present makes it possible to copy the infor-mation directly. In fact, the results of Kardash and Kroeker (1989) demon-strated that in cloze and application tests there appeared to be no benefitassociated with reviewing notes. Instead, in free recall performance thechance to review one’s own notes prior to the test prompted one’s memoryfor the target information.

How thoroughly notes have been written is also probably related to theeffectiveness of reviewing. In some cases, the presence of complete textinformation has been shown to direct students toward surface-level pro-cessing. Therefore, access to the text information during writing should notnecessarily divert more effort to comprehending and integrating the mainideas (Kirby & Pedwell, 1991).

The findings of Kiewra and his colleagues (1988) confirmed the differen-tial review effect of various types of provided notes. They found that re-viewing either outline or two-dimensional matrix notes (viz., notes recordedwithin the intersecting cells of the matrix) produced higher recall perfor-mance than did linear notes, but only matrix notes produced higher transferperformance (synthesis/application) than the other types. In that study, how-ever, the subjects did not record the notes themselves.

It has been suggested that students perform better on materials they gener-ate themselves instead of studying materials generated by others (e.g., Fooset al., 1994). Van Meter et al. (1994) further reported that college students’own notes were personally meaningful to them because these representedtheir personal selection of important points and were only fully understand-able to them as their creators. Students’ proceduralized, composed way oftaking notes may consequently be more effective for note-takers than anyexperimenter-imposed techniques (Thornton et al., 1990; Kardash & Am-lund, 1991). Similarly, the effect of reviewing spontaneous notes may beeven greater than reviewing directed notes.


Taken together, there is considerable evidence demonstrating the impor-tance of reviewing notes in learning from lectures (e.g., Kiewra et al., 1991)and text comprehension (e.g., Kardash & Kroeker, 1989). Second, despitenot being allowed to review the notes, spontaneous note-taking activity wasstill useful (Lonka et al., 1994; Lahtinen et al., 1997). However, there hasbeen little effort to investigate the independent effect of reviewing differenttypes of naturally taken notes. The present study thus intends to specify therole of processing and reviewing spontaneous notes more clearly.

PURPOSE AND PREDICTIONS

The purpose of the present study was to investigate (a) whether the previ-ously confirmed review and process effects of note-taking are also foundwhen notes are taken spontaneously without manipulating the participants’proceduralized note-taking behavior and (b) whether review and process ef-fects differ given qualitatively different outcome demands. Text comprehen-sion was assessed by success in essay-type tasks designed to measure de-tailed learning, the ability to learn the main ideas from the text, and abilityto review knowledge critically.

As in previous research (Lonka et al., 1994; Lahtinen et al., 1997) thepredictions of this study are based on the theoretical assumption that textcomprehension results in a mental representation which qualitatively reflectsdifferences in mental operations (van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983; Kintsch &Kintsch, 1996). These operations range from superficial processing to deepunderstanding of the situational model. Process effect of note-taking heremeans the activity of producing notes resulting in variation in note qualityand extension.

First, it was hypothesized that the process effect of notes would be impor-tant: the more extensive and qualitatively better notes would be positivelyrelated to text comprehension. Our earlier research shows that the studentswho summarized the content matter of the text were expected to performbetter than the students who took notes following text order or only copiedverbatim. This hypothesis was based on the formation of internal connectionsbetween the text units expressed by paraphrasing, thus requiring the use ofbackground knowledge more effectively than in verbatim copying. Per-taining to the quantity of note-taking, the students who spontaneously pro-duced more extensive notes were predicted to perform better than those whotook less extensive notes.

Second, the participants who were allowed to review their spontaneousnotes while answering the essay-type tasks were generally hypothesized toperform better in text comprehension than the students who were prohibitedfrom reviewing their notes. On the basis of external memory function, thereview effect would be more crucial in a task which required detailed learn-ing than those requiring critical review of the text by making inferences.

6 SLOTTE AND LONKA

Third, an interaction between the process and review effects was expected,such that it would be more useful for the students to review their own sum-mary notes than their verbatim notes. Those students who had the chanceto review their notes later but nevertheless did not take any probably do notdo very well either. In contrast, those students who cannot use their noteslater may deliberately choose not to write them because of using more inter-nal than external processing.

METHOD

Subjects

The subjects were 226 applicants for admission to the Department of Health Care Studiesat the Espoo-Vantaa Polytechnic. All had to participate in an entrance examination in order togain admission to a 31/2-year study program combining health care and undergraduate studies.Applicants were a rather homogenous group; 96% of them were female and 85% of themwere under 25 years old. They were considerably high achievers, i.e., approximately 54%having obtained excellent grades in their high school coursework (Mean 5 4, SD 5 0.66 inthe scale ranging from 1 to 6). Further, because the program is very popular, the participantscan be considered to be highly motivated.

The data on 12 applicants who had previously studied philosophy at school were also ex-cluded in order to eliminate the confounding effects of prior knowledge. This was done becausesubjects with previous philosophy studies differed significantly from those without prior philo-sophical knowledge in the sum scores of all learning tasks (F(1, 225) 5 7.41, p , .05). Thus,the material and notes of 214 subjects (117 reviewing and 97 not reviewing their notes) re-mained for analysis.

The Origin of a Research Design

The experiment task used in this study was a part of the entrance examination, although itwas not treated as such without taking into account the differences in the test conditions (i.e.,reviewing or not reviewing spontaneous notes). The original idea was to give similar instruc-tions to all applicants in the entrance examination. However, one of the two associate psycholo-gists who conducted the tests misunderstood the instructions and told the applicants that theycould not review their notes during the essay-writing. Since there were no opportunities toarrange a new test, the differences in essay scores due to the different test conditions were takencare of statistically. This was done by a specialist in statistics who compared the distributions ofthe essay scores of different groups. The comparison resulted in giving those participants whodid not have the chance to review their notes additional points to compensate for the benefitof having that chance.

What must be kept in mind is that the decision of acceptance or nonacceptance into theprogram was made according to the standardized scores. The reason for downplaying theinformation is the great variety of other tests used in the entrance examination, i.e., fivepen-and-pencil tests, several psychological aptitude tests, and an interview. Again, the essaytest in question was only one part of the whole entrance examination, the most decisive partbeing the interview. Further, the rights of applicants were protected by carefully clarifyingthe procedure that was used to compensate for the lack of having the chance to review thenotes.

All this misunderstanding was unfortunate from the administrative point of view. Naturalsettings in note-taking, however, seldom provide a situation where applicants are randomlyaddressed to different study conditions. Therefore, the entrance examination in question of-


fered a unique opportunity to investigate review effect of spontaneous note-taking on reallearning in a real learning situation.

Materials and Procedures

The material consisted of a 10-page article about Spinoza’s philosophical views on educa-tion, levels of knowledge, and the model of perfection of human life. Instead of mentioningthe author’s name in the text, the name ‘‘Spinoza’’ was replaced with an ‘‘X.’’ This arrange-ment was beyond our control. The main criterion for choosing the text material for the learning-from-text test was unfamiliarity with the subject matter for as many participants as possible(for review, see, Lindblom-Ylanne et al., 1996). The idea of this test was that the text bedemanding and lengthy enough to prevent participants reading it more than twice. There wereno headings in the text nor a title.

All participants were given their own copy and were informed that they could record noteson an attached blank sheet of paper in any way they desired. Writing on text papers or underlin-ing words or passages in it was forbidden. Before starting to read the text, half the studentswere told that they could review their notes during essay-writing tasks, whereas the otherswere told that they would write them without their notes. The instructions stated that all an-swers would be credited for content and for concentrating on essentials. The subjects wereaware of being tested on essay-type tasks, although they did not know the nature of the tasksthey would be given later.

All subjects were told that they would have 40 min to read the text silently. The limitedreading time was set to prevent them from learning the text by heart and to encourage themto concentrate on essentials. Before the questions were given the articles were collected andnot returned to the participants. The answers to each question were to be written in a givenspace in the blank answer sheet. However, the instructions indicated that they could use theother side of paper if necessary. Another 40 min were allowed to complete three differenttasks.

In the Definition Task, the central concept in Spinoza’s philosophy in defining ‘‘growthprocess’’ and ‘‘education’’ (‘‘conatus’’), located in the middle of the text, had to be explained.This task was thought to measure both recall and comprehension of a central detail from thetext (i.e., being able to explain it). In the Comparison Task, X’s (i.e., Spinoza’s) ideas of thedifferent levels of knowledge had to be comparatively explained. This task required synthesisof the three main ideas from the beginning of the text. In the Evaluation Task, subjects hadto critically review the writer’s educational views. Thus, it was not enough to remember thetext material; integration of the essentials of the text with existing knowledge was also calledfor. This task was thought to measure the ability to go ‘‘beyond’’ the text by evaluating theviews in question from the subjects’ general knowledge.

Scoring

Analyses of Essay-Type Tasks

All tasks were assessed both for the total number of words and for the content. The groupof four official raters from the Department of Health Care Studies developed a detaileda priori scoring system for analyzing and evaluating the content to each answer. The scoringsystem for each task was based on the content analyses of the phenomenon described in thetext. One point was awarded for each relevant idea unit and students’ own task-related exam-ples or ideas. Points for own examples required more than just mentioning separate concepts,e.g., they required some clarification in a few sentences. Because the answers were rathershort, the maximum score for Concept Defining was 7, for the Comparison Task 12, and forthe Evaluation Task 14.

8 SLOTTE AND LONKA

The scoring system was applied to all answers (N 5 214). To assess the reliability rating,the random sample of 97 answers in each task was then scored independently by anotherrater. Pearson product moment correlations between the ratings reached .89, .81, and .90,respectively. All analyses were based on the original scores given by the group of officialraters with slight modifications (i.e., after a consensus was reached by discussion concerningthe scores for seven answers).

Analyses of Notes

The quantity of notes in both writing conditions (reviewing or not reviewing the notes)were counted for the total number of words recorded. The number of words was used as anindicator of note quantity for practical reasons. The quality of notes was measured in twoways to assess the degree to which facts are presented discretely as opposed to interconnectedly(Kiewra et al., 1995). First, global coherence was assessed by rating notes on a scale from 1to 3 by the degree to which they illustrate a word-for-word writing style (scored as 1), asummarizing style following the organization of the text (scored as 2), and a summarizingstyle connecting the various ideas of the text (scored as 3). The notes of both the latter twogroups were written in the students’ own words.

Next, organizational scores of ‘‘0’’ and ‘‘1’’ were rated on the appearance of a heading orother higher order concept in notes as an indicator of local coherence. Theoretically, identifyingthe heading should facilitate relational performance by imposing a meaningful structure onideas (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987). Interrater reliabilities for both measures to all noteswere established by two independent raters. Pearson product moment correlation between thetwo ratings was .83 for global coherence, and the agreement between raters for local coherencewas .76 (phi coefficient). After the reliability scoring, any differences in final scores weresettled by discussion between raters.

Statistical Procedures

As was pointed out, the process effects of spontaneous note-taking were analyzed accordingto note quantity and note quality. The differences in quality of note-taking were measured asboth the global and local coherence of notes. Initial examination using two-way analyses ofvariance revealed, however, that local coherence was not independently related to the successof the essay-writing tasks nor were there any interactions between local and global coherenceon each task [F(1, 213) 5 0.01 2 1.63, p . .05, F(3, 213) 5 0.25 2 0.61, p . .05]. Givenno adjustment to the dependent variables, local coherence was omitted from future analyses.The measurement of global coherence of notes is thus alone used to refer to note quality,yielding the following groups: (1) single words or phrases copied, (2) notes following textorder, and (3) summary of the content of the text.

The participants were divided into three equally sized groups (1) small quantity (1–96words), (2) average quantity (97–150 words), and (3) large quantity of notes (151–327 words)on the basis of the number of words produced in notes. The fourth group (4) consisted of allsubjects who did not take any notes spontaneously during text reading.

To investigate first the effects of reviewing the quantity of spontaneous notes on text com-prehension, a 2 3 4 between-subjects multivariate analyses of covariance (MANCOVA) wasconducted using three dependent variables: Definition, Comparison, and Evaluation. Indepen-dent variables were reviewing activity (reviewing or not reviewing spontaneous notes) andnote quantity (none, small, average, and large). To control for the possibility that review andprocess effects on text comprehension could have been due to differences in previous schoolperformance, prior high school performance was included as a covariate. For this analysis,then, the original sample of 214 was reduced by 8 to 206 by excluding those applicants whodid not provide information as to their previous school success.


Second, to investigate the effects of reviewing qualitatively different types of spontaneousnotes, a 2 3 3 factorial design was performed using three dependent variables associated withtext comprehension. Independent variables were reviewing activity (reviewing or not re-viewing spontaneous notes) and note quality (single words or phrases copied, notes followingtext order, and summary of the content of the text). Adjustment was again made for previousschool performance.

There were no differences between the experiment groups in overall high school perfor-mance [t(204) 5 2.47, p 5 .64]. Correspondingly, the number of missing observations inschool performance were evenly distributed among the two writing condition groups [χ2(1) 5.25, p 5 .62]. Neither were differences found between the participants’ ages [t(224) 5 1.53,p 5 .13]. In all, the two groups appeared to be quite similar to each other except for beingable to review the notes or not.

RESULTS

Differences in Spontaneous Notes: The Impact of Havingthe Opportunity to Review the Notes Later

The experimental groups differed significantly from each other in notequantity [t(212) 5 7.24, p , .001] and in global coherence [χ2(3, N 5214) 5 22.2, p , .001]. That is, the participants who had been told before-hand they would have the opportunity to review their notes while doing theessay-type tasks spontaneously produced far more words (M 5 147.7, SD 569.6) than those who were prohibited from reviewing their notes (M 5 81.6,SD 5 62.4).

Moreover, the opportunity to review the notes encouraged subjects to writemore globally coherent notes. It appeared that over half of the participants(56%) in the reviewing condition group wrote summaries from the contentof the text, whereas the corresponding proportion among those whose noteswere not available for review was 32%. Far fewer participants took verbatimnotes, such as copied single words or phrases, in the reviewing condition(2%) than in the nonreviewing condition (14%). In addition, while the distri-bution of the local coherence of notes was not significantly different acrossthe groups [χ2(1, N 5 214) 5 0.2, p 5 .66], about one-quarter of the subjectsin both groups wrote a heading to their notes.

In general, despite the limited reading time, the majority of the spontane-ously recorded notes were written in the participants’ own words instead ofmerely copying the information from the text. However, a few applicants(8% in all) took no spontaneous notes while reading the text. As one mightexpect, almost all of these nonnote-takers were in the group prohibited fromreviewing their notes during essay-writing.

Note Quantity and Review Effect

Table 1 shows means and standard deviations for the Definition, Compari-son, and Evaluation tasks. Results of the assumptions of homogeneity ofregressions were satisfactory in the Definition and Evaluation tasks; how-

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TABLE 1Means and Standard Deviation on Essay-Type Tasks According to Note Quantity and

Reviewing Activity

Essay-type tasks

Definition Comparison Evaluation

Group/note quantity n M SD M SD M SD

Not reviewing the notesNone 14 1.36 1.60 5.14 3.25 5.79 2.91Small 42 1.24 1.28 5.93 2.18 6.02 2.34Average 27 1.37 1.86 6.26 2.86 5.96 2.49Large 14 1.50 1.74 6.43 2.38 6.14 2.11

Reviewing the notesNone 4 0.75 1.50 3.00 2.45 2.50 0.58Small 22 2.41 1.76 6.23 2.81 6.55 2.39Average 38 2.74 1.66 6.82 2.06 7.37 1.94Large 53 3.53 1.41 8.04 2.09 7.49 2.04

Note. The total possible score for the Definition task was 7, for the Comparison task 12,and for the Evaluation task 14.

ever, the Comparison task was affected by interaction between note quantityand prior school performance acting as a covariate [F(3, 193) 5 4.21, p 5.007]. In general, those with better prior school knowledge and those whotook more extensive notes received higher scores. Yet the subjects with thepoorest school performance who nevertheless took the most extensive notesscored highest in the Comparison task. School performance was otherwisenot related to note quantity in either of the experiment groups (r 5 .01 andr 5 .05, n.s.).

After adjustment for prior school performance, combined dependent vari-ables related to text comprehension varied significantly with both note quan-tity [F(9, 445) 5 2.91, p 5 .002] and the review effect [F(3, 183) 5 3.42,p 5 .018]. Significant interaction was also observed for these main factors[F(9, 445) 5 2.22, p 5 .020]. These results reflected a reasonable associationbetween the quantity of notes and the combined text comprehension vari-ables, with η2 5 .13. The association was less substantial between reviewingactivity and combined DVs, η2 5 .05, and between DVs and prior schoolperformance, η2 5 .08. The association for the interaction between notequantity and the review effect was slightly higher, with η2 5 .11.

Table 1 shows that in all tasks, the participants who spontaneously tookmore extensive notes on average obtained higher essay scores than the sub-jects who took less extensive notes during text reading. The poorest perfor-mance was generally found among the participants who did not spontane-ously record any notes at all. Reviewing previously made notes was also


TABLE 2Tests of Covariate, Note Quantity, Review Effect, and Interaction

UnivariateEffect DV F df α

CovariateDefinition 3.90* 1/185 .050Comparison 13.22*** 1/185 .001Evaluation 4.75* 1/185 .045

Note quantityDefinition 2.76* 3/185 .043Comparison 6.67*** 3/185 .001Evaluation 3.27* 3/185 .022

Review effectDefinition 8.48** 1/185 .004Comparison .01 1/185 .980Evaluation .36 1/185 .550

Note quantity by revieweffect interaction

Definition 1.92 3/185 .130Comparison 2.70* 3/185 .050Evaluation 4.84** 3/185 .003

related to higher scores in comparison with completing the essay-type taskswithout reviewing the notes.

To investigate more specifically the power of each main effect on theindividual dependent variables and, more importantly, to determine the exactcause of the interaction between note quantity and the review effect, univari-ate analyses were performed on three essay-type tasks. The results of theseanalyses are summarized in Table 2.

As Table 2 shows, previous school performance uniquely adjusted thethree essay-type tasks. After adjustment by the covariate, the effect of takingdiffering quantities of notes was significantly related to all essay-type tasks.The review effect was instead limited to defining the central concept of thetext. Further, the tests of simple main effects on the significant interactionbetween note quantity and review effect affected the Comparison and Evalu-ation tasks (α 5 .05). With regard to both these tasks, the participants whodid not spontaneously take any notes while reading the text did not eitherbenefit from reviewing them. Instead, the nonnote-takers who knew before-hand that they could not use their notes while writing the answer performedbetter than those nonnote-takers who were allowed to review. Figs. 1 and 2depict the interactions graphically.

Pool-within-cell correlations among essay-type tasks and the covariate areshown in Table 3. Prior high school performance was significantly relatedto success in the Comparison and Evaluation tasks.

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FIG. 1. The interaction between note quantity and the review effect on the comparison task.

FIG. 2. The interaction between note quantity and the review effect on the evaluation task.

TABLE 3Pooled Within-Cell Correlations between Three Dependent Variables and

the Covariate, Prior School Performance

Tasks Comparison Evaluation School performance

Definition .37** .12 .13Comparison .24** .25**Evaluation .14*

** p , .01; *p , .05.


TABLE 4Tests of Covariate, Note Quality, Review Effect, and Interaction

UnivariateEffect DV F df α

CovariateDefinition 2.64 1/173 .106Comparison 10.07* 1/173 .002Evaluation 3.80 1/173 .072

Note qualityDefinition 2.81 2/173 .063Comparison 9.83*** 2/173 .001Evaluation 3.60* 2/173 .030

Review effectDefinition 23.21*** 1/173 .001Comparison .62 1/173 .433Evaluation 6.00* 1/173 .015

Note quality by revieweffect interaction

Definition .90 2/173 .410Comparison 2.07 2/173 .129Evaluation .06 2/173 .938

Reviewing Qualitatively Different Types of Spontaneous Notes

A 2 (reviewing the notes or not) 3 3 (quality of notes) between-subjectsmultivariate analysis of covariance was also applied using three dependentvariables related to success in essay-type tasks. The results of the assumptionof homogeneity of regressions were satisfactory. After adjustment by covari-ate, a significant main effect for note quality emerged [F(6, 342) 5 4.08,p 5 .001] and, as in previous analysis, for the review effect as well [F(3,171) 5 .856, p , .001]. No interaction was found between reviewing qualita-tively different types of notes on text comprehension [F(3, 342) 5 1.13, p 5.342]. The strength of the association between note quality and the combinedtext comprehension variables was moderate, with η2 5 .13, and betweencombined DVs and the review effect, η2 5 .14. To investigate the impactof each main effect on the individual dependent variables, a univariate analy-sis was again performed. Results are summarized in Table 4.

Table 4 shows that the effect of processing qualitatively different notesemerged in the tasks requiring comparison and evaluation of text content.This indicates that the advantages of note quality are more apparent whenstudents are expected to relate information from different parts of the textinstead of memorizing individual details. Analyzing the effect of reviewingspontaneously taken notes, it appeared that the review effect was felt bothon the Definition and the Evaluation tasks. However, it was related more

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TABLE 5Means and Standard Deviations on Essay-Type Tasks According to Note Quantity and

Reviewing Activity

Essay-type tasks

Definition Comparison Evaluation

Group/note quality n M SD M SD M SD

Not reviewing the notesWord and phrases copied 15 1.00 1.20 5.13 2.29 5.13 2.17Summary notes following text order 37 1.03 1.32 5.84 2.59 5.84 2.29Summary of the content of the text 31 1.84 1.85 6.86 2.10 6.68 2.33

Reviewing the notesWord and phrases copied 5 2.40 1.67 3.60 2.70 6.20 4.02Summary notes following text order 42 2.79 1.68 6.98 2.37 6.76 1.99Summary of the content of the text 66 3.26 1.57 7.74 2.03 7.67 1.91

Note. The total possible score for the Definition task was 7, for the Comparison task 12,and for the Evaluation task 14.

strongly to success in the Definition task (η2 5 .12) than the Evaluation task(η2 5 .3).

Scheffe’s test, with its significant difference procedure (α 5 .05), wasalso used for post hoc comparisons among the content means of the notequality. Results revealed that all the subjects who wrote summaries from thetext content performed better than those who took summary notes followingthe text order and those only copying separate words or phrases from the text.These results were similar for both the Comparison and Evaluation tasks. Inthe Comparison task, the subjects who took summary notes following thetext order also outperformed those who made verbatim notes. Summarizing,then, seems to have a reliable impact on deep-level text comprehension. Ta-ble 5 shows means and standard deviations for all essay scores.

Table 5 also shows that in the Definition task, the benefit of reviewingthe notes was superior to taking any type of note qualitatively. That is, theparticipants who reviewed the notes containing only separate words andphrases scored higher than those who wrote summary notes following textorder or who summarized the text content but did not review their notes. Inthe Comparison task, obvious benefits derived from making more globallycoherent notes regardless of the reviewing activity. Thus, writing any typeof summary from the text, even without the opportunity to review it, resultedin better comprehension than reviewing merely verbatim notes.

DISCUSSION

Both the review and process effects of spontaneous note-taking wereshown to affect text comprehension, as expected. The results gave support


to the hypothesis that the quantity and quality of spontaneously constructednotes contributed to learning from text. These results are of practical impor-tance because they provide information about what kind of notes studentsspontaneously take when learning from an unfamiliar text in a real learningsituation. Moreover, the results of this study further extend previous note-taking research, demonstrating the complicated relations between the qualityof the learning task, processing activity, and reviewing activity.

The Qualitative Learning Outcomes

It was found that taking extensive and high-quality notes is related to suc-cess in tasks calling for deep-level discourse processing. This finding sup-ports the view that the process effect of note-taking is of great importance.The finding that the process effect was obvious mainly in tasks where thestudents’ own inferences were called for is coherent with the idea that pro-ducing additional elaboration helps the subjects to fill in information omittedin the text to draw inferences in meaning-making (Mayer, 1992; Mayer etal., 1996).

When only detailed learning was called for, there was more benefit inreviewing the notes in comparison with writing qualitatively better notes.These results are in line with previous research on lecture learning, indicatingthat the mere process of taking notes without reviewing does not necessarilyproduce better recall than listening to the lecture without note-taking (Kiewraet al., 1991). It could thus be argued that in tasks only calling for memoriza-tion, the effect of reviewing one’s own notes might be more powerful thanthe activity of mere note-taking. Yet, as previously has been concluded (Ben-ton et al., 1993), review appears to be dependent on the quantity of the re-corded notes.

In sum, the process of taking spontaneous notes, even without reviewingthem, produced better performance in the tasks that required evaluating andcomparing different text segments. This indicates that when students areasked to make their own inferences, the ‘‘copy–paste’’ strategy (i.e., textinformation is copied as such during the reviewing activity) is presumablyinadequate without forming relationships between the concepts and back-ground knowledge (see, Kirby & Pedwell, 1991).

These results are compatible with predictions we have previously drawnfrom van Dijk & Kintsch’s (1983) model (Lonka, Lindblom-Ylanne, &Maury, 1994; Lahtinen, Lonka, & Lindblom-Ylanne, 1997): in this view,writing more extensive summaries would improve the quality of deep-levelmental representations. That is, when writing in one’s own words, the infor-mation is interpreted through one’s existing knowledge. Therefore, the sub-jects who write qualitatively better notes may have a difficult time distin-guishing text material from the general knowledge with which it had becomeintegrated (see Kinsch, 1994). As a result, summarizing the contiguous text

16 SLOTTE AND LONKA

parts may not necessarily result in better fact recall. Lonka and her colleagues(1994) showed that when some minor detail was in question, only spontane-ous notes that paid specific attention to this very concept helped in recallingit. A central concept, however, was learned regardless of note-taking strat-egy. Thus it is possible that fragmented notes help in detailed learning, giventhat the detail in question is included in the notes.

Spontaneous Note-Taking

It was clear that those participants who were informed beforehand thatthey would be permitted to review their notes made considerably more exten-sive as well as qualitatively better notes than those who knew that they woulddo their various tasks without reviewing their notes. These findings have anatural explanation—obviously high-quantity and better organized notes aremore useful when reviewed. Presumably, more words were also needed togive reasons or draw conclusions than to simply reproduce text (see, Lonka &Mikkonen, 1989). This also raises potential suggestions about the likelihoodof encouraging the students to take more sophisticated notes by providingthe opportunity of future review.

Interestingly, there were participants who spontaneously wrote summariesfrom the text despite being aware that they could not review the notes later.This may be explained by the students’ metacognitive beliefs about ways toenhance their learning (Simons, 1996). Those who wrote summaries know-ing that they could not use them later probably believed that note-takingalone facilitates the process of understanding and organizing the learningmaterial. Van Meter, Yokoi, and Pressley (1994) obtained results consistentwith such beliefs. However, in most other previous research, students havenot been told whether they would have the notes available for review (e.g.,Kiewra et al., 1991). Additional research is therefore needed to determinewhether the opportunity to review affects the quantity and quality of notesin all situations.

In general, the results showed that spontaneously recorded notes were, forthe most part, summaries written in the students’ own words rather thanverbatim copying. This finding differs from Kiewra et al.’s (1995) resultson lecture learning, which indicated that notes students ordinarily took with-out any aid were brief, verbatim accounts of the lecture. It is possible, how-ever, that reading even unfamiliar text provides better opportunities to orga-nize notes when learners may skim and reread particular types of informationand even slow down their reading rate for better concentration.

As we have seen, a few participants chose not to spontaneously write anynotes while reading the text. It could be argued that these nonnote-takersmight not have been sufficiently interested in doing their best to understandthe text. On the other hand, they might also have been less successful intaking any spontaneous notes. However, the interaction between review ef-


fect and note quantity showed that of the nonnote-takers those who couldreview their notes performed worse than those who could not. It is likelytherefore that the knowledge that the notes would be available later for re-view may have affected the level of text processing as described by Kirbyand Pedwell (1991). They demonstrated that the text present condition (re-viewing the text during writing task) appeared to ‘‘bring out’’ surface pro-cessing in those who were inclined to it, perhaps via the copy–paste strategy.By contrast, having no text facilitated deeper processing for the studentswho normally adopted a deep approach and who were able to produce moreextensive summaries.

Unfortunately, in this study it was not possible to take the approach tostudying into account. Processing and reviewing the notes affected text com-prehension regardless of good prior school performance, although previousschool performance was related to better results in most essay tasks. Thusit should be noted that these findings do not indicate whether the better resultscome from the participants general note-taking ability or the spontaneousnotes recorded.

The present research brought other limitations that might also have af-fected the students’ normal note-taking activities. One is that the subjectswere not allowed to underline or mark the text in any way, but instead tooknotes only on a separate sheet of paper. Some participants might, for exam-ple, have been accustomed to underlining the text before note-taking, so thatthis may have seemed unnatural for them. Second, the text was written with-out any title or heading, which does not correspond to the usual authenticsituation. Similarly, both reading time and note-taking time were limited. Itis thus possible that the participants did not use more time-consuming waysof taking notes, such as summarizing and outlining, to the extent they nor-mally would.

The other question remaining unaddressed here is the effect of note-takingon a delay test. Generally, when one takes notes on a text in preparation foran exam, there is a delay between the time when the notes are taken and thetime of testing. However, as the results of Kardash and Kroeker (1989)showed, placement of review period only affected recalling the information.That is, the closer to the time of testing that one is able to review his or herown notes, the more likely the review will enhance one’s memory. Instead,when knowledge application was called for, they found no effect of re-viewing the notes at the different time.

In addition, when reading and taking notes, test participants were unawareof the nature of the tasks they would be given later. With respect to theeffects of varying test expectancy, Kardash and Kroeker (1989) found thatproviding students with knowledge about how they would be tested did notresult in enhanced performance. Yet, in most study situations, students pre-sumably increase their knowledge of the subject area and get ideas about

18 SLOTTE AND LONKA

the nature of the exam during the term. On the other hand, students alsoface study conditions in which a wealth of unfamiliar information has tobe processed within a limited time and in which an immediate response isrequired.

It is also worth pointing out that the experimental text used here was aboutphilosophy. It is possible that success in this specific domain requires aparticular type of text processing and note-taking skill. However, our pre-vious work indicates that analogical results are obtained in the domain ofstatistics (Lahtinen, Lonka, & Lindblom-Ylanne, 1997; Lonka, Lahtinen,& Lindblom-Ylanne, 1996). Prior knowledge of the subject domain alsoobviously produces greater text comprehension. The main criterion forchoosing the text material for the test was, however, its unfamiliarity toall participants.

Implications for Instruction

Our results clearly show that the process of recording notes is related totext comprehension even without any instruction on how to produce thenotes. In particular, it was found that spontaneous note-taking is effectivewhen deep-level understanding and one’s own inferences are called for. Thefact that the review and process effects of note-taking are different, de-pending on the nature of the task, poses challenges to instructional designers.First, students should be made aware that various note-taking strategies exist.This requires developing metacognitive knowledge about when and underwhat conditions a particular type of note-taking activity is more effective.Further, the learning situations should be such that rote learning would notbe reasonable.

Our results have important theoretical and pedagogical implications, sinceboth this study and our previous research have shown that the quality ofspontaneously used learning activities determines the quality of mental repre-sentation formed of the materials to be learned (Lahtinen et al., 1997;Slotte & Lonka, in press). Students should thus be encouraged to constructwell-organized and extensive summaries and other records in a way thatallows them to reconstruct the text information from their mental modelrather than reproducing it.

Since the strategies students spontaneously use will presumably vary de-pending on the subject domain, difficulty, length, and the way the text hasbeen written, further research should be conducted to explore the effective-ness of note-taking practices as a function of various learning situations anddemands.

Finally, it is important to obtain information about students’ spontaneousstudy activities in order to plan more successful study strategy training. Re-cent European research indicates that study skill training may be most effec-tive when it is process oriented and integrated with domain-specific instruc-


tion (Lonka & Ahola, 1995; Vermunt, 1995). Implementing study skillscourses which do not take natural ways of learning into account may simplybe a waste of time. Research on ecologically valid learning settings, wheresubjects are highly motivated, will also help us to design new instructionalinnovations.

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Documents

Review and Process Effects of Spontaneous Note-Taking on Text Comprehension