Lecture Handouts and Student Note‐taking

In this paper five experiments are described which examine relationships between the design of lecture handouts and students’ note‐taking practices. The experiments look at the effects on note‐taking of (i) the presence of a handout; (ii) deleting items in order to provide more space on a handout; (iii) increasing the amount of space between items on a handout; and (iv) omitting words and phrases on the handout which have to be completed by the student during the lecture. The results in each experiment indicate that note‐taking practices vary as a function of the design of lecture handouts.