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Should Instructors Provide Students with Complete Notes? By Maryellen Weimer

Course management software programs make it especially easy for instructors to provide students with a set of complete lecture notes. It seems that more instructors are doing this, as witnessed in the regularity with which students ask that the instructor’s notes be posted. But is giving students a complete set of notes a good idea?

Previous findings (like those of Kenneth Kiewra, highlighted some years back in this newsletter) recommend against this practice. Kiewra’s research demonstrated both a process and a product benefit of note taking. The process benefit accrues when students make selections about what to note and when they use at least some of their own words to record that material. When students record lecture content using their words, it becomes easier for them to connect new material with things they already know. This process benefit is lost when students are provided with complete notes. Even so, students prefer teacher notes because they think that having the content in the instructor’s words will better prepare them for exam questions.

The product benefit of note taking obviously comes as a result of having a product, in this case a set of notes, that can be reviewed and studied subsequently. It is generally thought that instructor-provided notes enhance this benefit because students don’t have to worry about losing notes (they are always available online) and because the material in instructor-provided notes is sure to be accurate.

However, a recent study confirms Kiewra’s earlier findings—but with an interesting elaboration. In this study, psychology students received either a complete or a partial set of instructor notes. The partial notes included major headings and titles made up of definitions and concepts, but students needed to write in the additional information. In both cases, students were instructed to download the notes and bring them to class. About three-fourths of the students complied with this directive.

The researchers looked at the impact of the complete versus the partial notes on exam scores, final grades, and attendance. They found that those students who received partial notes performed better on the third and fourth exams and earned significantly higher course grades. They did not find “differential effects of note type on class attendance.” (p. 10)

There was one other “noteworthy” effect. On the final exam, the students who received partial notes performed better on conceptual questions, those questions that involved “application of a theoretical concept to an example that required additional mastery of the material beyond the definition.” (p. 8) Researchers speculate that the students with partial notes had encoded material throughout the semester, and when confronted with the large amount of material they needed to know for the final, they understood more and so had to rely less on memorization.

Based on their findings, these researchers recommend providing students with partial notes. Giving students some notes conveys the instructor’s sensitivity to their concerns about getting the material they need from a lecture. If those notes provide the outline or structure of the material, students can concentrate on understanding the information rather than on trying to figure out how to prioritize and organize the material. Partial notes also clarify what students need to be writing and still retain the process benefit of note taking by forcing students to encode some of the content. The researchers summarize their results this way: “Partial notes … may provide a nice balance in terms of providing students with some notes, which they report as helpful, and still requiring encoding and higher-level processing of information, which will ultimately improve learning and performance.” (p. 11)

Reference: Cornelius, T.L., and Owen-DeSchryver, J. (2008). Differential effects of full and partial notes on learning outcomes and attendance. Teaching of Psychology, 35 (1), 6-12.

Originally published in The Teaching Professor, June/July 2008

Have you ever felt that the first part of your course seems more exciting, easier to teach, and more motivational to your students than the second half? If so, Here are some great ideas to enliven the last part of your course so that the semester ends with meaning for both you and your students. This article was unearthed from the May 2008 issue of The Teaching Professor just for you.

End Notes: Distinctive Ways to Wrap-Up a College Course
By Margaret Walsh, Keene State College, New Hampshire

Notetaking: How are your lectures structured? Do you begin with an outline? How do you signal to your students what is and is not critical information? How do students prepare for your class/lecture?

Notetaking is not a skill that comes naturally; neither is it one that we gain by doing it a lot–badly. Spending a few minutes at the beginning of a course to explain how you lecture goes a long way to making even the first lectures meaningful learning experiences for your students.

Students want to know: Is your material a review of their assigned reading? If so, is it organized in the same way?  Is it new/complementary material to assigned reading? What should they do to prepare for the lecture? How will you let your students know the key points (e.g.,”let me repeat that again,”). Do you have any notetaking tips for your students? Do you allow taping of your lectures? Should students copy what is on your PPT?

Content: How much of the lecture content is new material? What is the level of complexity? What have students learned earlier that relate to the new material? With what vocabulary must the students be familiar? Do you use a PPT or other presentation software? 

Is your content complex? If so, how about relating it to prior learning, providing concrete examples, or asking the class to contribute an example to check for understanding? Are you planning  appropriate pauses to ask for questions?  Have you thought about pausing at critical points in your lecture and asking students to write for one minute about their understanding of what you just said, or write a question about what they just heard? How much material do you put on a presentation slide? The JOY OF SIX relates to good PPT use: no more than 6 lines per slide, no more than 6 words per line, and only key ideas and high points. Use the presentation software to include key points and visual examples to add to the understanding of your lecture. What about putting the key points of the presentation on VoiceThread and requiring students to provide audio, video, or written commentary and questions to help you gauge understanding.

These ideas are only the tip of the iceberg when considering good lectures. Stay tuned.

1. There is such a thing as getting in a “mental rut,” blanking out, or being preoccupied so that we can’t access material in our long term memory, even though a we may understand the material. Stress or other emotional factors can compete for our concentration. My personal examples of the result of this phenomenon are walking out the classroom door and immediately remembering the answer/term/solution to a question, or being able to see in my mind’s eye the page of text and where the term in bold is located, remembering the term’s meaning, but not recalling the term itself. Some tactics for alleviating mental ruts/mental sets are sufficient reviews; preparing students in advance for the type of test items to expect; providing clear, well written items that clarify the expected response; and setting an “assessment climate” early in the year in which assessment is “show what you know” rather than “gotcha on that one!”
2. When we are ill, assessment accuracy suffers. Recognizing when students are truly unwell can allow a teacher the discretion to test ill students at another time for more accurate measurement.
3. Okay, maybe you’ll say there is no such thing as luck, but we all do tend to learn some material better than others and sometimes we can even “luck up” and guess the correct answer on multiple choice items. Providing sufficient reviews can assist students in sufficient preparation. Researching guidelines for writing/selecting appropriate test questions can reveal to us how to write “really good” items that aren’t as susceptible to guessing.

“I always encourage people to use their own music creations in the videos they produce, but I recognize that that is not always possible or practical. My next recommendation then is to use Creative Commons licensed music (here are seven good sources). This morning through Pitchanan Gaysornmas I learned about another good place to search for and find Creative Commons music, the Vimeo Music Store.

“The Vimeo Music Store offers more than 45,000 music tracks. Not all of the tracks are free or Creative Commons licensed, but roughly one-third or more of them are. In the Vimeo Music Store you can search for music by genre, license type, price, and length.

“Applications for Education
The next time your students are developing multimedia projects for your class, have them take a look through the Vimeo Music Store to see if they can find a tune to enhance the message of their productions.”

There’s a definitional “looseness” about many of the terms commonly used in higher education. I know, I’ve written about this in previous blogs, but when terms are bandied about assuming everybody defines them similarly, that’s a recipe for misunderstanding. Equally important, we can be using terms without having done the intellectual homework necessary to precisely understand their referents.
Case in point: active learning. Not so long ago in a workshop discussion, I asked for definitions. I gave participants a couple of minutes to think or jot notes. Here’s some of what I got, “students doing” “activities that engage students” “passive learning is an oxymoron” “teaching that gets student involved with the content” “when students participate or do group work.” Although similar, I would say that all those descriptors are different. None of them are bad or wrong; most of them are pretty superficial when compared to a definition like the one for active learning that appears in The Greenwood Dictionary of Education.
Greenwood defines active learning as “The process of having students engage in some activity that forces them to reflect upon ideas and how they are using those ideas. Requiring students to regularly assess their own degree of understanding and skill at handling concepts or problems in a particular discipline. The attainment of knowledge by participating or contributing. The process of keeping students mentally, and often physically, active in their learning through activities that involve them in gathering information, thinking and problem solving.”
I’m not proposing this as the “right” “best” or “only” definition for active learning, but I am proposing that it’s a good deal more specific than most of us would offer. Now, if we sat down and thought about active learning, if we talked about it with colleagues, I’m pretty sure that the definitions we’d develop would rival this one. But my point is we can regularly use terms like this without having done that careful thinking.Carefully crafted learning experiences 
There are some things about this definition that I do like. Sometimes we think active learning is “activity for the sake of activity” without being mindful that it’s equally about what students are doing. According to this definition they are engaged in activities designed to encourage reflection, designed to confront them with their knowledge and skill levels and designed to get them interacting with information. That’s not just any old activity—that’s a carefully crafted learning experience.
Most faculty know that active learning is important even though many still lecture pretty much exclusively. Most will even go so far as to admit that students learn better when they are active, not passive. And almost all faculty report that they use active learning. But I’m hoping this discussion is making clear that there is active learning and then there is active learning.
Student engagement exists along a continuum. I think the Greenwood definition is active learning at a highly engaged and highly effective level. The nice thing about a continuum is that things can be moved along it. So, if you don’t have time at the moment to create one of those carefully crafted learning experiences, you can take an active learning strategy you currently use, say participation, and make it more active. You can do that by asking a good, thought provoking question, following it with 30 seconds of silence and follow that with two minutes during which students share their thoughts with each other before discussing the answer with the whole class.
Or, you could pause after presenting a chunk of content and tell students you don’t intend to proceed until they’ve asked at least two questions about the material. You might jot those questions on the board, type them into the computer and then let the class take a crack at answering. Write down the essence of their answers and then discuss the merits of their various replies.

FERPA does not forbid instructors from using social media in the classroom, but common sense guidelines should be used to ensure the protection of students.
Resources:
American Council on Education, Letter on FERPA, May 8, 2008.
Justin Bathon, Controversial New FERPA Rules take Effect Next Week, EdJurist, December 30, 2008, (edjurist.com/blog/controversial-new-ferpa-rules-take-effect-next-week.html)
Justin Bathon, Keeping the Definition of Biometric Records Under Control, EdJurist, October 8, 2009, (edjurist.com/blog/keeping-the-definition-of-biometric-records-under-control.html)
Fryer, Unmasking the Digital Divide, (unmaskdigitaltruth.pbworks.com/w/page/7254094/ferpa)
NC State University FERPA Guidelines, (delta.ncsu.edu/teach/ferpa)
Norwich University FERPA Guidelines, (norwich.edu/academics/pdf/registrar/ferpa-compliance.pdf)