Students' notemaking activities and academic achievement

A modified, descriptive case study of student notemaking activities was conducted within an introductory level psychology course at an urban university. Note creation and note use were examined in and out of the classroom to provide an understanding of the relationship between notemaking activities and student academic achievement. The teacher's schema for content were found to influence student notemaking activities in four different situations, namely, during lectures, during independent reading/studying, while taking examinations, and when writing term papers. Notemaking was found to be a recursive generative activity. Note creation in conjunction with note use in different situations served to repeat content so that successive versions of students' notes were modified and resulted in additional notes. Notemaking facilitated students' development of schema for content influenced by the teacher's perspective. Notemaking during lectures was crucial for developing schema which were consistent with the teacher's schema. High levels of achievement on short answer examinations were related to students' development of schema consistent with that of the teacher. High levels of achievement on term papers were related to task completion. Students' schema for notemaking changed as the semester progressed. The teacher's schema for assigned tasks and for grading were negotiated and modified over the course of the semester.