A Note-Restructuring Intervention Increases Students’ Exam Scores

Abstract

It was hypothesized that students’ learning would be enhanced by an intervention getting them to elaborate on and restructure the notes they had taken in lecture. Students in a research methods course were randomly assigned to weeks in which they would turn in a copy of their restructured lecture notes along with a very brief summary of the class. This intervention required students to spend quality time-on-task. Subsequently, results of exam questions from weeks in which students completed the intervention were compared to weeks they did not do so. The intervention improved student performance by a full class grade (11 percent, effect size d = 1.1) and it improved performance equally for students at the top, bottom, and middle of the class.

Keywords:

• note-taking
• deliberate practice
• active learning
• comprehension
• testing performance
• lecture classes
• educational intervention

Notes

Of the 79 students, 74 completed a note-restructuring assignment during their randomly assigned week, giving a 94 percent compliance rate. To preserve the virtues of random assignment (namely, the ability to infer causality), the 5 students who did not complete the required assignment were included in the analyses presented in the text. In the second half of the course, students were given the option to replace the grade on their first note-restructuring assignment by doing a second note-restructuring assignment. Only 24 of 79 chose to do this second assignment. With 70 percent of the students not completing an assignment on the randomly selected week, an analysis of second exam questions parallel to the one reported in the text was not significant.

The effect remains significant if the untransformed raw proportion is used in the analyses, t(78) = 3.79, p < .0003. It also matters little whether or not one includes the results of week 6, in which no student had to complete a note-restructuring assignment. If one includes week 6, the t-statistic comparing the assignment week to the nonassignment weeks goes from t(78) = 4.87 to t(78) = 4.83. The difference between the week students completed the assignment and week 6 was also significant, t(78) = 4.08, p = .001.

It is possible that the effect of the intervention is driven by those who completed the assignment at the beginning of the course “sloughing off” during later weeks when they would not be called on to submit their re-constructed notes. The students who did the assignment in the first few weeks did benefit more from the intervention than students in later weeks (by week, the size of the benefit was 13%, 35%, 24%, −17%, and 3% for weeks 1 to 5, respectively). However, the effect does not seem to be driven by the early students sloughing off in later weeks. The raw percent correct for weeks when the student was “off” did not vary much by when the student did the note-restructuring assignment (“off” week scores were 56%, 65%, 62%, 66%, and 59% for students who did their assignments in weeks 1 through 5, respectively). For reasons that are unknown to us, the assignment was just more helpful for those randomly assigned to weeks 2, 3, 1, and 5 (in that order), and it actually may have had a negative effect for those in week 4. Our suspicion, however, is that this is simply chance variation. The data do suggest that the effect of the intervention is not due to early students deciding to “slough off” later on in the course.