ARTICLE: Student Note-Taking and the Brain
Allison Paludi admits she was guilty of giving very vague directions about note-taking to her sixth graders. So she set out to find a brain-based solution.
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A Brain-Based Solution to Student Notetaking
By Allison Paludi
“When you see a word in red, copy it down.”
“Take notes on what’s important.”
“As you read, jot down what you learned.”
Three very vague directions that I am guilty of saying to 11- and 12-year-olds. Countless packets printed with fill-in-the-blanks. Or a blank piece of paper with a giant “space for notes” across the top. Does any of this work?!
It wasn’t until this past year that I fully grappled with the question: How do I help my students take really good notes?
In high school I remember copying word for word from the projector slides. In college my very first class didn’t have a projector. Thus, no slides to copy. Didn’t even have a handout. Just a textbook. My own notebook. And pen and highlighter – wasn’t sure which one to use.
I couldn’t tell you what was even said during those lectures. I sure did write a whole bunch of things down though – racing my pen to paper to capture everything my professor uttered. Yet, to this day, I couldn’t name one fact from that course. For sure, not sticky at all.
My search for stickiness
So now here I am, trying to make material “stick” for my middle schoolers. From my first year using the “Cloze Notes” fill-in-the-blank strategy to the even more vague “Jot down what’s important,” I always grappled with how to foster note taking strategies that truly do work. How do I get middle schoolers to actually make sense of material presented to them?