The Effects of Note-Taking Skills Instruction on Elementary Students’ Reading

Abstract

The authors investigated the effects of a 5-week note-taking skills instructional program on note-taking and reading comprehension performance of elementary students. The participants included 349 fourth-grade students from 2 elementary schools in Taiwan. The Note-Taking Instruction group received approximately 40 min of note-taking skills instruction per week for 5 weeks in contrast to the free note-taking group and the free-recall writing group who did not receive any instruction. A note-taking evaluation task and a comprehension test were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the instruction on students’ performance in note taking and reading comprehension, respectively. The study yielded 2 findings: first, teaching students a note-taking strategy significantly improved their performance in note taking and reading comprehension, and second, poor readers showed the greatest gains in note-taking skills with instruction.