Attention vs. Retention: Effects of Notetaking on Short and Long Term Memory

Overview

Objectives Many students prefer to take a photograph of the teacher s notes with technological devices rather than hand-write their own notes. We wondered if this might have an impact on student focus and retention of information during the lesson. We designed a test to try to see if we could discover an answer. Methods In our experiment, we tested 120 students in grades 5,6,7 and 8. We divided them into two groups: a control group and an experimental group. We created a lesson about an obscure animal species to eliminate the potential of prior knowledge as an interfering factor. We wrote a quiz to assess recall of the subject matter. Both groups listened to the lesson presented by the teacher. The control group was instructed to take their own notes. The experimental group just listened, and was assured that they could take an iPad photograph of the instructor s notes at the end of the lesson. Once the lesson was finished, both groups were immediately given a memory test on the presented information. One week later, they were given another copy of the same test to attempt to evaluate long term retention. Results According to our results, the collective average of all test subjects scores in the control group taking notes was 12.75% higher than the experimental group counterpart for the short-term recall test. In the long-term recall test, the collective average of the subjects scores in the control group taking notes was 8.75% higher than the experimental group. In summary, the subjects who took notes did 12.75% better than those who just listened, waiting to take a photograph at the end of the lesson. On the long-term memory recall test, the note-taking group also performed significantly better than the experimental group. On average, the female subjects scored higher than the male subjects by about 2.00%, which was no significant difference. Conclusions Overall, the notetaking group earned an average score of 84.00% on the short-term test and an average score of 70.75% on the long-term test. The picture-taking group earned an average score of 71.25% on the short- term test and an average of 65.00% on the long-term recall.

Awards (1)

• Honorable Mention

Competition history

• CSEF 2019 Cognitive Science (Junior Division Only) · Entry J0706

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• CSEF Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• Every CSEF 2019 project