How collaboration influences the effect of note-taking on writing performance and recall of contents

Note-taking is a commonly applied pedagogical strategy across all areas of education. In higher education specifically, there has been an increasing push to get students involved in collaborative note-taking in order to increase their engagement with the contents and to inspire deeper and more meaningful learning. However, there is a lack of clarity as to whether collaborative note-taking positively influences student performance. For this reason, the present study (n = 189) compares the learning performances of students in a collaborative note-taking condition to those of students in an individual note-taking condition. The students were compared in regards to their retention of information and their performance on academic writing. The study found that students from the collaborative note-taking group performed better on measures of retention, while the individual note-taking group performed better on measures of academic writing. These results suggest that while the collaborative processes of group note-taking lead students to retain more information, these processes do not lead to better performance in academic writing. The present study fills a gap in the research by showing how the effectiveness of collaborative note-taking might depend on the learning context or on the desired result of the class.