Effects of Notetaking and Studying on the Retention of Prose

Abstract

College students, equally divided between good and poor readers used one of five study-notetaking strategies for retaining prose information. Students just read, or read and took either restricted or unlimited notes on a passage. After reading, subjects directly or mentally reviewed their notes before taking a recognition and recall examination. Recall and recognition performance was measured immediately and one week later. None of the notetaking-study strategies helped for the recognition test or for the recall of main ideas, but the various strategies led to considerable differences in performance on a general recall test of detailed ideas.