System 29 (2001) 405–417

www.elsevier.com/locate/system

Note perfect: an investigation of how students

view taking notes in lectures
Richard Badgera,*, Goodith Whiteb, Peter Sutherlandc,
Tamsin Haggisc
a
Centre for English Language Teaching (C.E.L.T.), Institute of Education, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9
4LA, Scotland, UK
b
School of Education, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK
c
Institute of Education, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, Scotland, UK

Received 27 June 2000; received in revised form 16 January 2001; accepted 5 February 2001

Abstract
Taking notes in lectures is a key component of academic literacy and has been much
investigated both from the point of view of the discourse structure of lectures and the ways in
which native and non-native speakers of English take notes. However, most research has not
considered the role of students’ conceptualisations of the process. This paper examines whe-
ther research into students’ conceptualisations can contribute to our understanding of taking
notes in lectures. The paper describes an illustrative investigation into student conceptualisa-
tions based on a series of structured interviews with 18 students, six first year traditional
undergraduates, six access students, and six first year international students. The interviews
examined how students think about the purposes of taking notes in lectures, the content of the
notes, what should happen to the notes after the lecture and the students’ previous experience
of taking notes. The paper concludes that our understanding of this aspect of academic lit-
eracy would be enriched if it took account of students’ conceptualisation of the process, that
this would lead to a more heterogeneous view of taking notes in lectures and that there may
be a case for more integration of EAP into mainstream courses. # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Keywords: Taking notes in lectures; Student views; Study skills; EAP

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +44-1786-466-130; fax: +44-1786-463-398.

E-mail address: rgb3@stir.ac.uk (R. Badger).

0346-251X/01/$ - see front matter # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
PII: S0346-251X(01)00028-8
406 R. Badger / System 29 (2001) 405–417

1. Introduction

Students at tertiary institutions come from a variety of academic backgrounds.

This means some students are less well prepared than others for study in a university
setting and raises the question of the extent to which universities should help stu-
dents with study skills, such as the focus of this paper, taking notes in lectures.
The students we work with range from those who might be termed traditional,
that is those who have normally entered university direct from UK schools, access
students, that is those for whom direct entry to university is not appropriate and
who hope to enter university after taking an access course, and international stu-
dents, that is those students who come from outside the UK.
The provision of support for taking notes in lectures varies considerably for these
three groups. Traditional students receive no systematic official support, though
some departments offer limited guidance through workshops and printed advice.
Access programmes run by the university normally provide some help with study
skills in general. However the main focus here is on writing and research skills and
relatively little time is devoted to taking notes in lectures. International students
whose mother tongue is not English are encouraged, and sometimes required, to
take one or two semester units in English for Academic Purposes (EAP), and these
units include some elements devoted to taking notes in lectures (MacDonald et al.,
1999). The starting point of this research was the question of whether this diversity
of provision was justified.
A considerable body of research has examined various aspects of lectures (e.g.
Bligh, 1972). One strand of this research has investigated the structure of lectures
and the ways in which different styles of lecture lead to different outcomes for the
student. So Flowerdew and Miller (1995, 1997) have looked at the notion of cultures
in lectures, Khuwaileh (1999) has examined the role of lexical chunks and body
language, and Thompson (1994), amongst others, has looked at the discourse
structure of lectures.
An alternative strand of research focuses on the notes taken in the lecture hall or
an experimental situation designed to replicate some elements of the academic lec-
ture. Both Clerehan (1995) and White et al. (2000) looked at the differences between
the notes taken by non-native speakers and native speakers of English and Hartley
and Davies (1978) and Kiewra (1987) summarise the research on native speaker note
taking and. Such research provides useful insights into note-taking from lectures and
has implications for courses in study skills and English for Academic Purposes.
However, much of the research is based on a rather simplistic view of the pro-
cesses that take place when notes are taken in lectures. In broad terms, notes are
seen as a record of the lecture with the student notes as a degenerate version of the
lecture. Indeed Brown and Atkins (1988, p. 9) explicitly say the lecturer transmits
and student receives. Firth and Wagner (1997, p. 289) describe this as the ‘tele-
mentational’ concept of message exchange.

Communication is viewed as a process of transferring thoughts from one per-

son’s mind to another’s (1997, p. 290).
 R. Badger / System 29 (2001) 405–417 407

This view pays insufficient attention to the role of students in the process and, with
some exceptions (Dunkel and Davy, 1989; Hodgson, 1997) treats students as passive
participants in the process. But:
listeners in real life do not usually (or ever?) simply react neutrally as ‘‘reci-
pients’’ (Lynch, 1998, p. 13).
If this view of communication is correct it means that the note-taker or listener
must be credited with a distinct personality and a point of view (Brown, 1995, p. 27).
The traditional view of taking notes in lectures has meant that there has been little
research into how students conceptualise what happens when they take notes in
lectures. This paper examines whether research into these conceptualisations can
contribute to our understanding of this component of academic literacy. We attempt
to do this by describing a preliminary investigation of these conceptualisations. Our
description has three parts. The first part offers a framework for describing the way
students view taking note in lectures, and the second part describes an investigation
of how groups of students from these three different cohorts, traditional, access, and
international, interpret their roles in taking notes in lectures and possible means of
supporting students when they take notes. The final section discusses some of the
implications of the research for taking notes in lectures generally and more specifi-
cally EAP courses.

2. A framework for describing students’ conceptualisation of taking notes in lectures

Students play a role in note-taking in lectures before, during and after the lecture.
Firstly, students arrive at a lecture with a range of reasons for taking notes.
People listen for a purpose and it is this purpose that drives the understanding
process (Rost, 1990, p. 7)
Secondly, students make decisions about what elements of the lectures are worth
writing down, influenced by the purposes for taking notes, their interpretation of the
lecture and the techniques to which they have access for taking notes. Finally, after
the lecture, students decide what to do with their notes. This gave us three areas to
investigate

Why do students take notes?

What kinds of things get written down? What techniques are used for writing
things down?
What happens to the notes after the lecture?

In addition we were interested in ways in which we could support note taking in

lectures and so we also wanted to investigate
What was the students’ history of taking notes?
How might institutional support improve note-taking skills?
408 R. Badger / System 29 (2001) 405–417

3. An investigation of students’ conceptualisations of taking notes

3.1. Procedure

The lack of research on the role students play in taking notes in lectures led us to
decide on a qualitative mode of investigation, based around semi-structured inter-
views to a small group of subjects.

3.2. Sample

Our subjects were 18 self-selected students, six traditional students doing a first
year unit in education, six access students, taking an access course within the uni-
versity, and six international students whose mother tongue was not English and
who were doing a first year unit on English for Academic Purposes.

3.3. Research instrument

We then administered a semi-structured interview, derived from the questions

given above. The interview schedule is in the Appendix to this paper. The subjects
were interviewed by members of the research team who were not teaching them,
except for three subjects, two access and one international. The interviews, which
generally lasted about 25 min, were audio-taped and transcribed. As far as possible
anything which could identify students or departments was eliminated from the
transcripts. Further information about the subjects is given in Tables 1–3.
The next section outlines our findings organised according to the questions out-
lined at the end of the last section.

4. Findings

4.1. Before the lecture: the function of note-taking in lectures

Most commentators (Hartley and Davies, 1978; Kiewra, 1987) suggest that the
aim of taking notes is to recall as much as possible of the lecture. Taking notes may
help achieve this aim because the process of taking notes aids concentration in the
lectures or because the product of note taking facilitates some kind of review process.

Table 1
Sex of subjects

Male Female

Traditional 0 6
Access 2 4
International 1 5
 R. Badger / System 29 (2001) 405–417 409

Table 2
Academic results in units

Fail 3 2(2) 2(1) 1

Traditional 0 1 0 4 1
International 0 1 3 1 1

This table gives the overall grades for the units taken by the subjects on degreeprogrammes. There are no
corresponding grades for Access students. However, all Access students were admitted to undergraduate
programmes in the UK. We know of only one student who dropped out after a semester.

Table 3
Units taken by subjecta

Cohort Subject areas taken

Traditional Education(6), Sociology(4), Philosophy(2), Business(2), French

Access Arts and Human Sciences
International EAP (6), Education(4), description of English(3), Japanese(2), Business (2), French(1),
a
Students on undergraduate degree programmes take up to three units per semester.

The reasons our subjects put forward were largely product oriented. All 18 sub-
jects mentioned reasons which fall into this category. We identified three kinds of
product reasons. Firstly, notes were seen as a means of aiding recall of what was in
the lecture, secondly, they helped with examinations and assignments and, thirdly
they were educational in a more general sense. There is some similarity between the
broad educational category and process reasons for taking notes. These three kinds
of reasons reflect conceptions of the lecture as separate events, as part of a course
and as a means of personal educational development but it is possible for someone
to subscribe to all three reasons. There were also some comments relating to taking
notes as a process.
Below we give examples of responses which fall into each of the three product
categories and the process category together with the numbers of subjects from each
group who offered these kinds of answers.

4.2. Product reasons for taking notes in lectures

Recall of the lecture (13 responses, four traditional, three access and six interna-
tional)
To be able to go through what’s happened in the lecture (traditional).
Basically to remember (access).
To remember what the lecturer has said (international).
Preparation for examinations and assignments (11 responses, four traditional, four
access and three international).
410 R. Badger / System 29 (2001) 405–417

To help with writing essays (traditional).

You need [notes] to get the points they want you to bring out in exams or essays
(access).
It helps with exams (international).

One access student thought that notes were not useful in this way.
I don’t really think they [notes] help you with exams or essays. For exams you
have books to read.
More general educational reasons (two responses)
Something that makes my brain think.
To educate myself.
This kind of reason was given only by two students, both access.

Process (three responses)

You have to concentrate (traditional).
If you were sitting in a lecture and just listening to somebody talking for an hour
you can easily drift off (traditional).
If the lecture is boring I take notes (access).
One international student, like some of Dunkel and Davy’s (1989) subjects, put
forward a kind of negative process reason.
I have to concentrate on understanding what he [the lecturer] says. I don’t have
time to take notes (international).
Again one traditional student said that she took notes out of fear of forgetting.
I think if I took that element of fear out of it then I would remember more.

4.3. During the lecture: the content of the notes

There was considerable variation, both between individual students and groups of
students, about what kinds of things they wrote down and the cues that they used.
We have classified the responses in terms of levels. The first level covers general
guidelines on what to note down, the second covers the kind of information and the
third relates to the cues which students use to determine what to write down.

4.3.1. General guidelines

Nine (out of 18) students said they wrote down key or important points. All the
international students, two traditional students and one access student gave this as
their main criterion. This is not a very transparent criterion but it may be that its
meaning varies so much between disciplines, lecturers and possibly lectures, that it is
not possible to be more specific. Two access students said they wrote down what
would be useful for essays and exams, and this could be taken as an explanation of
what is important. However, further investigation of what students interpret as the
 R. Badger / System 29 (2001) 405–417 411

key points would need to relate students’ comments to particular lectures, the notes
they take in those lectures and the lecturer’s views of what was important.
Rather to our surprise, four traditional students and one access student, but no
international students, said that they wrote down as much as they could, though this
reason was not seen as incompatible with, for example, writing down what was
important. Such views suggest that students see their notes as a deficient version of
what the lecturer says.

4.3.2. Kinds of information

Several students mentioned the kind of information that they would write down.
Five students (three traditional, one access and one international) mentioned factual
information and four (three traditional, one international) the lecturer’s opinions.
There was some divergence about noting down their own ideas or responses, with three
students (one traditional and one access) including their own ideas and five (one
traditional, one access and three international) excluding their own ideas. This relates
quite closely to the extent to which students conceptualise lectures as monologues or
dialogues, and their own roles as recipients as opposed to constructors of knowledge.

4.3.3. Cues for note-taking

Ten students, all the traditional students, two access and two international stu-
dents, mentioned the use of the overhead projector or PowerPoint. This contradicts
Hartley and Davies’ (1978, p. 216) finding that:

Information presented in slides or transparencies is unlikely to be recorded in

students’ notebooks.

Our reading of this is that the use of the overhead projector and PowerPoint is
consistent with transmission views of learning where lectures are primarily monologues.
All the students who said that they exclude their own opinions cited the use of OHPs
or PowerPoint as a signal of importance. Some examples of student comments follow:

Everything you need to write down is up on the screen and basically you copy down
exactly what’s there. Nothing from the words the lecturer is saying (traditional).
In the [. . .] department everything is done on computer. I think if it’s done that
way it feels as if you have to take notes (traditional).
I try to copy them [OHPs] down if they are hand written (access).
I will copy down things on the OHP because it’s an important point (international).

Again this is evidence of students seeing their role as recipients of knowledge. What
is interesting here, though, is that some students seem to be aware that the use of
techniques such as PowerPoint reinforce a transmission model of learning. Whatever
is thought of this model of learning, it would appear that students are responding
intelligently to a particular kind of context.
None of our subjects mentioned discourse markers at this stage in the interview
but this point was raised under the heading of what lectures can do to help student
412 R. Badger / System 29 (2001) 405–417

take notes effectively and this can be seen as supporting the line of research into
discourse structure of lectures (e.g. Flowerdew and Tauroza, 1995).

4.4. During the lecture: techniques in taking notes

There was variation between the cohorts on the number of techniques used in
taking notes. Traditional students identified a much wider range of techniques (28
in all, averaging over 4.5 techniques per student), compared with either access (six,
one per student) or international students (16, 2.7 per student). This may reflect the
degree of integration into undergraduate life. But in the light of White et al. (2000)
this may indicate that the traditional students were more expert at taking notes.
Abbreviations, underlining, and the use of space were the only strategies that were
mentioned by all three cohorts. The widespread use of abbreviations confirms the
findings reported in Dunkel and Davy (1989).
The students were asked what they considered to be good notes but this was often
interpreted as what kind of notes they would borrow from a fellow student after
missing a lecture. Here students mentioned tidiness/legibility (five traditional, one
access and three international) and having the important points (three traditional,
one access student and one international). Two access students said that whether
notes were good or bad depended on why they were being taken.

4.5. After the lecture

Students carried out a range of activities involving their notes after the lecture.
The most common was to re-read the notes as preparation for an assignment or a
lecture (six traditional, two access and four international). As noted above, one
access student said that lecture notes did not help with exams or assignments.
Many students also mentioned filing systems (five traditional and three access).
Interestingly, no international students mentioned this. Other relatively frequent
responses related to re-reading soon after the lecture (three traditional and two
access) and re-writing (three traditional, one access and one international). The
range of activities cited by the groups varied. The traditional students gave 19
activities, the access students 13 and the international students 10 (Table 5).

4.6. History of note-taking

All the traditional students had some experience of note-taking before coming to
university, compared with 22% in Dunkel and Davy’s (1989) study of American
students. However, only three of this cohort had taken notes from lectures or similar
extended speech. One student mentioned dictation and one copying from the black-
board. Both dictation and copying encourage a view of lectures as monologues. One
student said that her note-taking in lectures developed out of note-taking from reading.
Reports of taking notes from lectures were less common for access students. Three
access students had experience of note-taking but two of these had simply taken
dictation.
 R. Badger / System 29 (2001) 405–417 413

Table 4
Techniques used in note taking

Ta Ib Ac Total

Abbreviations 3 5 1 9
Numbering 1 2 0 3
Asterixes 3 1 0 4
Underlining 4 2 1 7
Connecting lines 1 0 0 1
Spaces 4 2 1 7
Arrows 4 0 0 4
Block capitals 1 0 1 2
Headings 1 3 0 4
Title 1 0 0 1
Symbols (e.g. triangle for therefore) 3 0 0 3
Boxes 1 0 0 1
Colours/highlighter 1 0 1 2
Bullet points 0 1 1 2

Total 28 16 6 50
a
Traditional students.
b
International students.
c
Access students.

Four international students reported taking notes before entering university but
one of these seems to have only copied notes from the blackboard. This is higher
than the figures of 40% for international students reported in Dunkel and Davy
(1989). We should note that all the international students in the study were doing a
unit on English for Academic Purposes and this included sessions in which they took
notes based on simulated lectures and extracts from recordings of actual lectures
rather than dictation type exercises.

4.7. Help

Traditional students were the most forthcoming about what help could be provided
but varied widely in what they thought would make note-taking in lectures easier.
The most significant factors were greater use of hand-outs (four traditional students)
and, as noted above, indicating that something is important (two traditional students).

You can take the information [on handouts] away and read it in your own time.
By the tone of their voice [lecturers] indicate what’s important.

But one student said:

The last time I got a handout I just binned it.

Other factors mentioned included some contradictory views on movement:

414 R. Badger / System 29 (2001) 405–417

Table 5
Post-lecture activities

Ta Ib Ac Total

File 5 0 3 8
Read-around 2 1 0 3
Re-read (not for assignments) 3 0 2 5
Read for exams, etc. 6 4 2 12
Re-write 3 1 1 5
Compare with colleague 0 1 0 1
Total 19 7 8 34
a
Traditional students.
b
International students.
c
Access students.

I don’t like people who tend to be jumping in their lecture. (traditional) I’ve
found it very difficult recently when one lecturer has stood at the front of the
lecture theatre and he just basically stands there. (traditional)

Visual aids were also cited:

I find it [PowerPoint] very useful (traditional).

Some lecturers . . . put something on the overhead and they whip it off just as
you are about to write it down and that is one of the most annoying things
(traditional).

This supports Habeshaw’s (1995) advice to lecturers to use visual aids more often
and more effectively.

One student also mentioned the degree of interactivity.

I think that what would be helpful . . . almost make it an option to be inter-

active. You know if I say something that you don’t understand, then question
me (traditional).

This fits in well with Gibbs’ (1992) suggestions for structured lectures which
include group discussion.
There was generally a rather negative response to the possibility of a course in
note-taking from lectures with four traditional students saying they would not have
attended such a course.

I know there are learning strategy courses but my needs are different (traditional).
I don’t think I would have gone to anything on it [note-taking] (traditional).
I think if you’re older you’ve got the experience of what you need and what you
don’t need (access).
 R. Badger / System 29 (2001) 405–417 415

The international students were not asked this question as they had already
attended such a course.

5. Discussion

This paper has described a preliminary investigation into how students con-
ceptualise taking notes in lectures and some issues related to ways in which students
can be helped with this skill. The study is based on a small group of informants and
it is unclear whether the findings are generalisable but this section outlines what we
think can be said on the basis of this study and identifies some areas where further
research is needed in terms of taking notes in lectures generally and, more specifi-
cally, how this relates to international students.
We have reached four conclusions about taking notes in lectures. Firstly and most
importantly, understanding the views of students on note taking in lectures, and the
considerable variation in how they conceptualise lectures, provides many insights
into this component of academic literacy and, we would argue, is a necessary
adjunct to other kinds of research in this area.
Secondly, many, if not most, of the students in our investigation see communica-
tion as telementational, rather than collaborative and learning as a matter of trans-
mission, rather than interpretation. Whether this view helps or hinders learning
needs to be investigated by future research. In particular, researchers need to exam-
ine the process by which content, whether packaged in a lecture or otherwise, is
transformed into, say, assignments or examination answers, and the role, if any, of
note taking in this process.
Thirdly, we are not able to comment on the differences between traditional,
international and access students in terms of support in taking notes in lectures,
except, possibly, to note that there is no clear evidence that the differences in the
amount of support offered to different kinds of students should be abandoned.
However, where there are differences between the ways in which international
and other students take notes in lectures, these can be linked to the fact that
these international students had taken a course in EAP and in particular a tend-
ency for EAP note-taking courses to be based on listening material on audio-
cassettes which do not form part of a coherent course or lead to examinations or
assignments. This may account for the fact that, for example, international stu-
dents are less influenced by the use of PowerPoint and OHPs, and give less
importance to a filing system than traditional or access students. On the
assumption that the traditional students are generally benefiting more from lec-
tures, researchers might investigate the advantages of integrating EAP students
into mainstream academic life rather than providing stand-alone programmes.
This would mirror the team teaching approach adopted by Dudley-Evans (1994)
and the way that EAL tutors in secondary schools often accompany their stu-
dents into subject classes.
416 R. Badger / System 29 (2001) 405–417

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the co-operation of students on education, access

and CELT units and the views of two anonymous reviewers.

Appendix.
Interview prompt sheet for investigation of note-taking while listening to lectures

1. (Focuses on whether students take notes at all): Do you take notes when you
are listening to a lecture?
If so, why?
If not, why not?
2. (Focuses on techniques they use while note-taking)
What do you note down?
What kind of techniques do you use?
What is your definition of good notes?
3. (Focuses on what they do with the notes after the lecture)
What do you do with the notes after the lecture?
4. (Focuses on past history of note-taking)
Have you had to take notes before?
Did you get any training on note-taking before you came here?
5. (Focuses on what we could do to help).
Do you tend to take more/better notes for certain types of lecture?
How do you think you could improve your note-taking?
In what ways could the lecturer help you to take better notes? E.g. would you
prefer to have a handout before the lecture, or not? How would you use it, if
you would like one?
What could the university do to help you improve your note-taking?

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Vitae

Richard Badger (LLB, PGCE (TESOL), MA, PhD) has taught in Nigeria,
Malaysia, Algeria and the UK. He currently teaches at the Centre for English
Language Teaching at the University of Stirling. His research interests are genre and
language teaching, EAP and culture in language teacher education.

Goodith White (BA, Dip TEFL, M. Litt) has taught in Italy, Finland, Singapore,
Portugal, Eire, and the UK. She is currently lecturing at the School of Education,
University of Leeds, and is pursuing doctoral research in sociolinguistics with Tri-
nity College, Dublin. She has recently published a book on listening for OUP.
Peter Sutherland has taught in England and Scotland. He is the author of Cognitive
development today: Piaget and his critics published by Paul Chapman in 1992 and
the editor of Adult Learning: A Reader published by Kogan Page in 1997. He lec-
tures in the Institute of Education, University of Stirling.

Tamsin Haggis (BA, Dip TEFL, MA) has taught in Italy, Japan, India and Aus-
tralia. She currently lectures in the Institute of Education, University of Stirling. Her
research focuses on the student experience of learning in higher education, particu-
larly in relation to access and postgraduate students. She is also interested in teacher
expertise in vocational education.