Effects of note-taking strategies and transcription fluency on students\u27 performance after viewing a video

Note taking is a common method students use to learn information from lectures. Guided notes (GNs) and graphic organizers (GOs) are used to improve the quality of students\u27 notes. The current study examined the effects of transcription fluency and note-taking method, namely GNs, GNsGOs (GNs with embedded partially complete GOs), and traditional notes on students\u27 performance on a recall and on an application task. Study participants attended a private high school located in a large urban area in northeastern United States. Students completed a letter fluency task as a measure of their transcription fluency. Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to determine whether the use of GNsGOs will predict higher scores on the outcome measures than GNs or traditional notes after accounting for transcription fluency. Better transcription fluency significantly predicted recall and application scores for all students. For the recall task, both transcription fluency and note taking were significant predictors. Higher transcription fluency was associated with higher scores and students in the GNs condition had higher scores than students in the traditional notes condition and students in the GNsGOs condition. For the application task, only transcription fluency predicted students\u27 scores. Students who had better transcription fluency also had higher scores on the application task. It appears that it may be too cognitively demanding for students to use GNsGOs while watching an educational video