Students' procedures for reviewing lecture notes

Abstract

Teacher education students were questioned about the purposes they established for use of lecture notes and their use of lecture notes was observed following the presentation of a short lecture. The students also completed a test on the lecture material. The purposes students established for their lecture notes covered a wide range of study and practical tasks. Notes were reported to be most commonly used for essay writing, which was the most common form of assessment for these students. The most frequent strategy students used for reviewing of lecture notes was some form of repetition. Less common was the use of complex elaborative procedures that involved generation of links among different components of the lecture notes, or between the new material and the students' existing knowledge. Concerns are raised about the state of the students' metacognitive knowledge about lecture-note review and about the need to include such knowledge in university courses.