Article
Note taking: the prerequisite skills
The prerequisite thinking and planning skills needed for the important skill of note taking.
Part of the College Readiness Resource Center, by College Success @ Perkins
This article is part 1 in a series. Please feel free to visit Part 2, Tips and models for effective note taking , and part 3, What do I do with my notes anyway? for the complete story.
As educators, we may assume students have mastered note taking early on in elementary or even middle school. And yet, students often do not simply pick up note taking skills by osmosis, or adjust note taking approaches when material becomes more complex. Most students benefit from clear and direct instruction of this skill.
For students with visual impairments, the challenges of developing the skill of note taking are compounded by the lack of incidental learning and lack of visual cues, and in some cases, they do not have the technology skills to effectively take notes, either from a lecture or from reading. Before you start to teach note taking formats and tools, you can do much in your role as TVI to help students with visual impairments prepare by teaching the prerequisite skills that lead to more impactful note taking.
The power of notetaking
Taking notes serves many purposes: to capture information for later reference or review, to push for deeper understanding, for reflection on a complex topic. For students to master the kind of note taking that allows them to process information deeply for true understanding of content, they need to intentionally develop the prerequisite skills of thinking first.
Learning is a complex act, and you as the TVI can break down the steps to effective note taking for your student so that you are instructing the needed thinking skills and habits. For students with visual impairments, these prerequisite skills often need explicit, repeated instruction because students miss them due to lack of incidental learning. You can tailor the teaching of prerequisite skills for note taking to fit the visual and learning needs of their student.
Robert Marzano, educational researcher and author of Classroom instruction that works: research-based strategies for increasing student achievement has identified instructional practices that lead to good thinking and learning in students. Some of his suggestions provide a simple outline to guide your work not only with students, but with their general education teachers, as well.
Skills and concepts for effective note taking
Making lists
For students with visual impairments, one key skill can require practice and reinforcement: making lists. It is helpful for students with visual impairments to gain and practice the understanding that information can be broken down into lists, since they will not automatically have the visual cues to pick this up incidentally. This skill can be practiced even before the more complex prerequisite skills of note taking take place. Younger students can work with you to get into the habit of making lists-it could be for anything! Doing so allows the student to identify the best “tool” to use to make the list, to build up their technology skills in making lists and also helps students to begin to gain the thinking skills that help them to produce lists. You can then work with them to reflect on how effective one approach is (using a braille device, for example), vs. an Ipad and speech to text.
Diane Brauner, manager for Paths to Technology, unpacks this further in her article, “Monster: Note taking skills” . She offers examples of how younger students with visual impairments can practice these prerequisite list making skills with you. You can adapt her same approach using content that is age-appropriate for your student.
Order of ideas
Understanding that any lesson, lecture, discussion, essay, or presentation contains an order of ideas (important ideas supported by other “smaller” ideas) is a crucial concept for students to learn to understand how to take good notes. Ideas build upon other ideas. As such, there is a gradual progression of thought.
Students who are visually impaired often need extended reinforcement and practice of these skills since their lack of visual cues can impede their comprehension of or identification of the progression of ideas, usually represented visually on the page. All of the images of outlines around a classroom for a 5 paragraph essay, for a compare and contrast essay, for example, are inaccessible for many students with visual impairments, even as their peers are immersed in it.
Exercises to teach how to prioritize ideas
- Offer a student a list of ten ideas and ask the student to rearrange the ideas into an order that progresses from main idea to subsets of ideas to examples. This will open up useful dialogue with the student about how writers and thinkers order ideas.
- Take a chapter from a textbook or novel. Work using the student’s preferred access tool to identify different elements such as headings and subheadings, paragraphs, conclusions. Practice creating an outline just using these. For low vision readers, work to manage use of vision to identify organizational structure, then consider moving to non visual reading to take notes, allowing students to bounce between auditory reading and taking notes via their preferred method (braille, handwriting then, ideally, typing on a laptop).
- Additionally, you can ask a student to create their own presentation on a book or other topic. Ask the student to list their ideas or topics in their preferred order and progression. Then reflect and discuss.
- Explore common organization of different types of paragraphs or papers, such as cause and effect, compare and contrast, or a simple paragraph outline: “Statement, proof, analysis” or SPA paragraph. Using Wikisticks, blocks, or other manipulatives, explore how these different organizational structures contribute to strong notes, and may inform how to take effective notes.
Outlining
Students with visual impairments need further illustration of the concept of big ideas and supporting ideas and examples. You can help to build understanding of the organization of a lecture or conversation or movie structure by outlining the progression from larger ideas to smaller ideas, with examples and sub-categories of an idea along the way.
In her article “Using Outlines to Support Student Note Taking”, Dr. Jennifer Bowman, who holds a degree in special education and a certification in counseling, suggests teachers create an outline for students to fill in as they read a reading passage, to begin this process. Additionally, tactile representations of the outline format may support students with visual impairments in comprehending the concept of the outline.
Key attributes of outlines
Outlines contain some attributes to reinforce as a teacher, such as subheadings. You may need to introduce students to the concept of a subheading. The subheading labels the smaller category of an overarching larger idea. A subheading will prove to be an effective tool for students to use as they begin to take notes.
For some students, it can be hard to understand what a subheading is because of the lack of visual cues that could aid their understanding. Therefore, you can work to offer additional tactile ways of comprehending a subheading–as a subcategory of a larger thought and as a smaller example within a larger point. Knowing when to put in a new subheading, and doing so, is also an area you can practice with students.
Indentations
The student with visual impairments often have limited or no visual cues of paragraph indentations to reinforce organizing elements for a student. For students who use a screen reader, or listens to audiobooks, this concept is key to support their comprehension and sense of organization.
When a device reads, it still doesn’t show these differentiated paragraphs or indentations. Yet as emerging writers and notetakers, students need to learn about the idea that a paragraph indentation signifies that there is a new idea starting. Learning when and why to make an indentation and start a new idea are crucial steps for a student to master before moving on to becoming an expert note taker, as they can leverage this cue.
For low vision students
For low vision students, relying upon visual cues for ordering ideas may need some support. In Edutopia, educator and researcher Dr. Beth Holland offers these tips on software that can support students in creating a smooth order of ideas in their note taking: “Most note taking and word processing tools quickly create bulleted or numbered lists. Several of my former students with visual-spatial challenges found that aligning text and creating visual order helped them better synthesize the information. And note taking apps like OneNote and Notability allow students to organize their notes using a familiar hierarchy. They can replicate digital structures they might use in the physical world, like binders, notebooks, and pages.” This suggests many parallel activities a TVI could implement to reinforce these organizational concepts!
Prerequisite notetaking skills
The following additional thinking, or cognitive, skills are critical for students to learn before note taking even begins.
Recognizing patterns
For many students, the ability to recognize patterns can be impeded because of the lack of visual cues about these patterns. As such, students with visual impairments can practice with you by identifying patterns in theme, wording, concept, major idea, and example. You may also benefit from using tactile tools to teach this concept of pattern recognition–to later be applied to abstract concepts such as ideas and examples in writing or presentations.
By teaching pattern recognition, you will set students up to understand the ways that writers, speakers, and presenters make sense of the world. Students can also then bring this understanding of patterns to their notes, as they will be able to identify patterns and, even more importantly, note the significance of these patterns, in their notes.
Compare and contrast
Understanding how to compare and contrast ideas or arguments, is a skill that serves students in a variety of capacities, including supporting critical reading skills. Knowing how to compare and contrast, and to recognize it in readings or lectures, is key skill for building the foundation of note taking and improved reading comprehension.
Being able to consider two different objects or ideas and figure out their similarities and differences often helps to reveal each object or idea more clearly. Such a thinking skill is useful in many fields, from the study of literature to history to science and math. When a student can show the ability to distinguish similarities and differences between ideas and examples, they can take notes on information effectively, using the compare and contrast skills to make better sense of information as they record it in note form.
Cognitive flexibility
As students begin to learn to take notes, they may need to demonstrate an ability to shift focus and attention from the lecture, book, video, or conversation to the notetaking platform and back again. Students may need to be able to listen at the same time as taking notes so they don’t miss the next piece of information. This is not a skill that students simply possess; it is a skill that can be built up through practice. If a student struggles with note taking, they may need to take time practicing this crucial foundational skill.
Of note, some students have processing speed challenges (think auditory processing) or task shifting challenges that may impact their ability to shift from one format to another (listening to writing on a preferred format). Other students may experience significant challenges in producing written materials through a preferred format, due to other processing challenges. In this case, experimenting with voice to speech (i.e. use of Voiceover on an Ipad, or a notetaking software such as Dragonspeak) may be a tool to integrate into these tasks. With time, many students develop a system that works for them, and that integrates approaches to managing the visual illustrations in reading, for example, into their notes, via support from a teacher, peer or other appropriate person, or via alt text.
Finally, while in high school, some students may have a paraprofessional taking notes for them in class, for some of the reasons discussed above. This may also be an option as an accommodation in college setting, with proper documentation. The key thing to make clear to your students, however, is that however notes are derived, the student must then know how to do something with them, such as review for understanding, review to prepare for an assessment, or to integrate into a class discussion. Noone else will do that part of the work-thus knowing how to take notes, and the related concepts behind it, is a critical tool for academic success, as well as employment success in many competitive environments.
Prioritization
Some of the critical thinking that a student will do when note taking is make decisions about what is important and what is not important or what is of lesser importance. This is prioritizing, a key critical thinking and organizational skill. This act of prioritizing leads to stronger understanding of ideas and information; the skill ensures that a student will not simply record what a professor is saying word-for-word, rather, a student can identify relevant information and big ideas from irrelevant information or supporting ideas.
Hypothesizing
Students’ ability to create hypotheses or test out ideas in order to then find out if they hold true help support effective note taking. Hypothesizing activates students’ engagement with material and encourages their independent thinking so that they are not simply passively absorbing and regurgitating material but actively considering it and making educated guesses about how it operates.
Inferential thinking
One important characteristic of note taking is a student’s ability, as they reach the middle of high school, to demonstrate inferential thinking. Inferential thinking involves the ability to take facts or concrete information and draw conclusions about it and make connections as learning becomes more abstract in high school and above. Inferential learning means that the student is filling in the gaps between the teacher’s words and is able to summarize, categorize, and connect with larger ideas so that the student can use this information to form new understandings and meanings.
A student who is a beginning note taker may simply write down word for word what a teacher is saying, therefore leading to the impossible task of trying to keep up with the teacher’s every word. Writing down a teacher’s words word-for-word also leads to notes which do not show much understanding of larger concepts and ideas, nor the ability to distinguish between what is important and what may be supporting a big idea.
On the other hand, a more sophisticated note taker who uses inferential thinking may be able to draw conclusions about what a teacher is saying, therefore taking notes on the main ideas inferred. This opens up an ability to make connections, take leaps to form deeper understanding, and bring ideas together as they strengthen their inferential thinking.
Exercise to reinforce these skills
Students can work with you to practice prioritizing before tackling the larger task of notetaking. You can set up a list of characters from a book or make a list of concepts from a recent math lesson. You can then ask the student to place these concepts along an actual spectrum (tactile form would be best) from least important to most important. By doing so, the student will have to consider the type of prioritizing that they are doing, and then consider how they would record similar hierarchy of ideas when taking their own notes.
Work with your student to reflect on what they are reading or listening to in a lecture. What is their internal dialogue? For example, “Juliet is crazy for falling for Romeo-it’s going to make a mess!!” or “Wait-didn’t we just learn about photosynthesis? This cellular respiration is kinda similar!” If a student has the ability to begin to record these insights, they will begin to learn how to make connections between their learning and their emerging critical thinking-key tools to empower a student with even greater critical thinking skills.
Activating prior knowledge and learning
Connecting current information to past learning or themes of a course or topics will help students to keep notes that further and deepen their learning. Helping a student to approach a lecture or lesson in class by having them contextualize the topic within their own previous knowledge will develop the good habit of getting a student to activate their prior knowledge. Of note, prior knowledge may also come from outside of school as well, such as from a summer activity.
Reviewing notes is actually a way to activate one’s prior knowledge. When a student can learn how to review previous learning, call upon previous knowledge, apply that new knowledge, and then make connections between previous knowledge with new knowledge, we have a student who is primed for most effective critical thinking and note taking.
Exercise to reinforce this concept
You can begin to set up the habit and practice of asking the student to review their class notes from previous days before they begin class. For some students, this might mean that you would require a student to review their notes for homework the previous night, in preparation for the new material in classes the following day. While you may tell students to do this, students often need the extra step of requiring them to do this, at first, and checking to see if they have done it. Follow up with the student over time, to see what differences they notice in their comprehension.
For students with visual impairments, these habits are impactful when established early in schooling, certainly by late elementary school. These habits build vocabulary, self awareness, and confidence, which students will carry with them through high school and into college and employment settings.
Synthesizing
A student’s ability to bring together facts, concepts, and examples and draw larger conclusions and themes from reading and lecture material should grow with time, and in considering other learning disabilities such as dyslexia, or other factors such as autism. Note taking involves the synthesizing of information that a teacher, textbook, novel or presenter, is offering. As such, there is much that a student must glean and make sense of. A close companion of the skill of prioritizing what is important, synthesizing involves taking the content that the student has prioritized as important and figuring out why it is important and how it applies to the topic.
Additional challenges to consider
Extra challenges for students with visual impairments can arise because students are relying upon their other sensory modes to do what most of their peers are doing visually. In some cases, students need practice and instruction on how to use these additional sensory modes effectively and efficiently. Effective reading means that a student is reading for comprehension, not burdened with decoding letter by letter. If your student is still doing this as a visual reader, it may be time to integrate additional access modes, such as listening.
Consider the following questions: How efficient is the student comprehending information through their different sensory modes (auditory, tactile, visual)? What is the level and speed of the student’s listening skills? Are these skills impeded or weak? Why? Focus, processing? Does the student need to increase their listening skills to allow for greater speed and understanding when they are listening to a lecture or presentation?
The input speed for a student who is getting information auditorily can be impacted by their ability to spell. A student must be able to integrate auditory input(listening to a book) into output that is written (via braille, handwriting or typing) is a skill that needs evaluation and practice before students sit down to engage in note taking. The information is going into the ear and out the fingers, and this coordination can often need further integration through practice and drills. A TVI may need to investigate situations when this breaks down. Are there attentional issues that are undiagnosed or unmanaged? Is auditory processing impaired in some way? These are critical questions to ask to support a student’s growth and development in their courses and over time.
When the output is not fast enough to use technology, for example through typing, a student will struggle to take effective notes. Typing efficiency is key to helping a student to take notes. Yet, a student might have sensory integration challenges with integrating auditory input with motor output. All of these parts need to be considered by a student’s team, as a student is learning how to take notes, with automaticity and instinct. These are core basic skills.
It is important that students access reading through braille, as well as through audio format, be exposed to the key concepts of orientation in space that will prepare them for good note taking. For example, braille teaches students the concepts of space upon the page and progression, physically, in space, that will be needed for note taking.
Conclusion
In the next article in the series, “Tips and models for effective note taking (Article 2 in a series)” we share with you the best ways to dive into teaching note taking strategies to students who have mastered the prerequisite skills.
This article is part 1 in a series. Please feel free to visit part 2, Tips and models for effective note taking , and part 3, What do I do with my notes anyway? for the complete story.
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