The Content of L1 and L2 Students' Lecture Notes and Its Relation to Test Performance

The lecture notes of 129 Ll and L2 students were examined in terms of five indexes for the content of notes: (a) the total number of words and notations, (b) the number of information units, (c) the number of test questions answerable from the notes, (d) the completeness of the notes, and (e) the efficiency of the notes. Three stepwise multiple regression analyses of the data were conducted to identify which of the indexes predicted achievement on the postlecture quiz covering lecture concepts and details for (a) the Li note takers and the L2 note takers as a group, (b) the L1 note takers, and (c) the L2 note takers. Results suggest that L1/L2 note takers who scored high on the recognition measure compacted a large amount of the lecture material into propositional pieces of information and detected and recorded information that subsequently appeared on the postlecture quiz. Implications of the findings for pedagogy and note-taking research are suggested. Taking lecture notes is widely accepted as a useful strategy for augmenting student attention and retention of academic discourse. Note taking is intuitively appealing to both learner and lecturer alike and is generally viewed as one class of mathemagenic activity (Rothkopf, 1970) that facilitates the process of learning and retaining lecture material. The facilitative effect of note taking is thought to derive from one or both of two postulated functions: (a) the encoding function and (b) the external storage function (Di Vesta & Gray, 1972). Encoding (the process) supposedly aids learning and retention by activating attentional mechanisms and engaging the learner's cognitive processes of coding, integrating, synthesizing, and transforming the aurally received input into a personally meaningful form. The external storage function of note taking is seen as important because the notes (the product) serve as an external repository of information