PROVIDING FULL NOTES
Kiewra reported that students who only review detailed notes provided by the instructor after the lecture generally do better on subsequent fact-based tests of the lecture than do students who only review their own notes. In fact, students who did not even attend the lecture but reviewed the instructor's notes scored higher on such tests than did students who attended the lecture and took and reviewed their own notes. This should not be surprising, because unlike the students' notes, the instructor's notes contain all the critical ideas of the lecture.
One might be tempted, however grudgingly, to conclude that providing students with full transcripts of lectures is the best way to optimize their learning of the material. After all, if the goal is to ensure that they don't miss the important ideas, what better way than to hand each student a full text of the lecture? But Kiewra cites evidence that students remember a greater proportion of the information in their own notes than in provided notes, and that students who take the same amount of time to review both their own and the instructor's notes perform best of all on fact-based tests where you can do my homework for me. Interestingly, the pattern of superior performance with provided notes changes when the test involves higher-order learning (e.g., analysis and synthesis of ideas). In such cases, having the instructor's notes does not produce superior performance.
These results suggest that there is some value in having students participate in the note-taking process, however incomplete their notes may be. A more practical disadvantage to providing full notes is that they may defeat the purpose of the lecture itself. Even if this is not the case (e.g., if lectures serve as opportunities for discussion or other interactive forms of learning), the availability of full notes may encourage absenteeism among students who fail to recognize the additional benefits of attending lectures. These arguments, together with many instructors' understandable objections to preparing and providing full notes, make a compelling case for alternative approaches.
HOW CAN STUDENTS' OWN NOTES BE IMPROVED?
Kiewra offers several suggestions, based on his review of the literature. Some of these call for alterations in the presentation of the lecture. Instructors not only should speak slowly enough to allow students to note important ideas, but also should consider "segmenting" their lectures. Segmenting involves allowing pauses of three to four minutes for every six or seven minutes of lecture. This enables students to devote their attention to listening during the lecture and then to consolidate the important ideas and paraphrase them during the note-taking pauses when you type my essay online. During the lecture phase, students need to be given cues not only to the importance of certain ideas, but also to the kinds of elaboration that they are expected to do on these ideas. In certain kinds of classes (e.g., medical school), where the amount of information that must be presented in a given time is relatively great, it may not be possible to segment the lectures, even though students stand to benefit most from segmenting in such cases. A suggested compromise is to keep information density low whenever possible (limiting the presentation of new ideas to 50% of the lecture time), and to provide skeletal notes in increasing quantity as a function of the lecture's increasing information density.
An additional suggestion by Kiewra is to encourage students to review not only their own notes, but other sources, such as other students' notes and outside texts. Exposure to a variety of renditions of the same material helps to ensure that the material will be preserved in at least one of the presented forms. It also increases the opportunities for more elaborative processing, as the sources are searched and integrated.