Podcast: How To Improve Student Note-Taking in 3 Smart Steps

When students take notes during a lesson, research shows they get just about 30 to 45 percent of the important information right on the first try. 

High school teacher Benjamin Barbour discovered this disturbing problem after taking a quick peek at his students’ notes midway through whole-group instruction. What he saw stopped him in his tracks. 

“While some students had terrific notes, others had a big list of facts from the lecture or from the book,” Barbour says. “There was no rhyme or reason. Maybe there was a date but no information attached. And I realized: My students can’t even use these notes.”

In this episode of School of Practice, we take a look at Barbour’s three-step process for teaching better note-taking and substantially improving study skills. Just a few minutes of practice each day, Barbour says, can yield big gains for student learning. Plus, he explains the brilliant strategy he uses to incentivize better note-taking and study habits in his classroom.

Related resources:

• Teaching Students What to Do With the Notes They Take Taking good notes is an important skill—and so is knowing how best to use them for learning.

• How Testing Students Twice Can Improve Note-Taking Skills Allowing students to take a test two times—once from memory and once using their notes—can boost note-taking, study skills, and reading habits, all at once.

• Neuroscientists Say Don’t Write Off Handwriting Brain scans reveal crucial reading circuitry flickering to life when young readers print letters and then read them. The effect largely disappears when letters are typed or traced.

• Research: Typed Versus Handwritten Lecture Notes and College Student Achievement: A Meta-Analysis (2024) Researchers compared achievement and note-taking outcomes among college students and found that “taking and reviewing handwritten notes leads to higher achievement.”

• Research: The Importance of Cursive Handwriting Over Typewriting for Learning in the Classroom: A High-Density EEG Study of 12-Year-Old Children and Young Adults (2020) Researchers compared brain activity while adults and twelve-year-olds performed three tasks: writing words in cursive, typing them on a keyboard, or drawing them. They found that cursive and drawing engaged neural networks in ways that are more supportive of learning and memory than typing.

• Research: Revising lecture notes: how revision, pauses, and partners affect note taking and achievement (2016) Researchers investigated the benefits of revising lecture notes to determine which revision methods produce higher test scores.
• Research: The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking (2014) This landmark study found that taking notes on a laptop is “less effective than longhand note-taking for learning” because typing “results in shallower processing” than writing notes by hand.