The Effects of Notetaking Approaches on Student Achievement in Secondary School Geography

The study examined the relative effects of three notetaking approaches in secondary school geography classes on students’ achievement. The approaches used were (a) students making notes based on teachers’ blackboard outlines, (b) students copying notes fully developed by the teachers, and (c) students forming their own notes. To accomplish this, a nine-lesson geography unit and a corresponding achievement test were designed by the researcher and validated with the aid of a panel of seasoned secondary school geography teachers and a pilot study. The test-retest method was used for the study and a reliability index of r = 0.85 was obtained. The test-retest method was used for the test and a reliability index of r = 0.85 was obtained. Geography students from four randomly selected secondary schools in the Oranmiyan local government area of Oyo State, Nigeria, were used for the study. Three of the classes utilized one of the notetaking approaches and served as experimental groups, while the fourth class served as the control group. In all, 180 students and 4 teachers were involved in the study. The pretest treatment, posttest control group design (Campbell & Stanley, 1963) was used. A comparison of the four classes on both the pretest and posttest conditions using the one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Newman Keuls Procedures (Winer, 1971, pp. 191-198) indicated that although the groups did not differ significantly on the pretest, the students that formed notes based on the teacher-provided outlines achieved better results.