Providing the Instructor's Notes: An Effective Addition to Student Notetaking

This review investigates the relative effectiveness of externally provided lecture notes, personally recorded notes, and a combination of the two. Findings indicate that students' own notes are generally incomplete and, therefore, inadequate for reviewing the lecture. Consequently, students who review a detailed set of lecture notes from the instructor generally achieve more on exams than do learners who review their own notes, while learners who review both sets of notes perform best of all. Teachers can also facilitate student learning by providing partial outlines (or skeletal notes) for notetaking prior to the lecture. The additive effects of receiving both partial notes before the lecture and full notes afterwards are unknown but logically beneficial. The paper concludes with instructional implications for increasing the review function of both externally provided and personally recorded notes.