Activity

Understand why some students, especially those with learning disabilities (LDs) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), struggle with taking effective notes.

Note-taking is an effective way for students to retain and recall information. Taking notes helps students to organize and process important information and to actively engage with the material. This skill becomes increasingly important as students progress through school and are increasingly expected to learn information from lectures or independently from content-area textbooks (e.g., science, social studies). Because many teachers assume that students will learn how to take notes on their own, they often do not explicitly teach this skill. What these teachers might not know is that taking notes requires students to use a number of subskills.

• Sustained attention
• Ability to receive information (e.g., written text, lecture) and process information (e.g., identifying main ideas, details) simultaneously
• Ability to comprehend the text
• Capacity to identify important information and determine what to write
• Organization and production of intelligible notes
• Handwriting (if using paper and pencil) or computer skills

Because students with LDs and ADHD tend to have difficulty with each of these subskills, they often have trouble taking notes effectively.

Identify at least one student who seems to have difficulty taking notes, then compare their notes from a lecture or assignment to yours or those of a student with good note-taking skills and respond to the following items.

1. Briefly describe the student’s overall note-taking approach. For example, did they try to write down everything or only the main ideas and relevant pieces of information?
2. Describe the differences between the student’s notes and the one used for comparison.
3. Regarding the note-taking subskills listed above, identify and discuss potential deficits that might be affecting the student’s ability to take effective notes.