An Analysis of Three Study Skills: Notetaking, Summarizing, and Rereading¹

Abstract

College students read a 2,000-word text with or without taking notes. Afterwards, one-half of the learners wrote passage summaries without referring to the text, while the remainder completed a spatial relations task. Subjects then either reread the original passage or engaged in placebo work. All subjects subsequently took both a 30- item immediate test and a seven-day delayed test composed of equal numbers of factual and idea questions. Both notetaking and rereading strategies improved recall; however, these effects were nonadditive. Participants recalled more substantive information, but rereading increased factual recall. The time and conditional probability analyses supported these findings. The authors concluded that the presence of the original text was essential to further learning.