Effects of repetition on recall and note-taking: Strategies for learning from lectures.

Students tend to emphasize important information more than less important information in their notes and recall for a lecture. We investigated whether this strategy changes when the lecture is repeated. In Experiment 1, students viewed a lecture one, two, or three times and, without being allowed to review their notes, took a recall test. In Experiment 2, students took cumulative notes on a lecture that was presented one, two, or three times, and, following a review of their notes, took a recall test. In both experiments, the most important information was heavily represented in students' notes and did not increase greatly with additional presentations; less important information was not well represented in students' notes after one presentation but increased greatly on subsequent presentations. These results support the hypothesis that students actively assess and, if necessary, shift their learning strategy each time a lecture is repeated. When students take notes on or recall a lecture, they tend to emphasize highly important information more than less important information. This levels effect in students' notetaking (Kiewra, 1985) and recall (Brown Meyer, 1975) suggests that students use a learning strategy of focusing their attention on the highest-level information in a lecture. What happens to this learning strategy when the lecture is repeated? What do students get out of extra exposures to a lecture? We address these questions in the present studies. Mayer (1983) and Bromage and Mayer (1986) have identified two possible effects of repetition on learning from prose: quantitative and qualitative. The quantitative hypothesis predicts (a) that repetition allows the learner to add more information to memory while maintaining the same learning strategy across presentations and (b) that the number of times a lecture is presented is positively related to the overall amount of information a learner will recall and have in his or her notes, with equivalent increases for each level of information.