Note Taking vs. Memory

Overview

Objectives/Goals My objective was to learn if people retain more information by taking notes. I believe that the group that does not take notes will perform better than the group that did take notes because they were paying more attention to the video instead of writing down notes. Methods/Materials I gathered 30 subjects, 15 male and 15 female, ranging from ages 13 to 14. I showed them a three minute video. Half of the subjects took notes (Group B), while the other half (Group A) did not. Group A consisted of 8 males and 7 females, and Group B consisted of 7 males and 8 females. After the subjects watched the video, I collected the notes from Group B and tested the subjects, using a ten question test that I created. Results The group that did not take notes (Group A) averaged a slightly higher score, 58 percent, while the group that did take notes (Group B) scored lower, with 54 percent, on the test. Conclusions/Discussion Although these results did support my hypothesis that Group A, subjects who did not take notes, would do better than Group B, subjects who took notes, I assessed that the small difference in the results and the small subject size did not clearly indicate that one method was better than the other. To research further on this project, I would test a larger subject size and create a test with more questions.

Competition history

• CSEF 2015 Cognitive Science (Junior Division Only) · Entry J0722

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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