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Teachers Activity links ____________________ Grammar advanced intermediate beginning ____________________ Reading abridged stories paraphrasing ____________________ Writing essay skills verb choice end focus ____________________ Listening Speaking Teaching Vowels s- endings note-taking skills ____________________ more to come... ____________________ created and maintained by Douglas E. Adams		Teaching Note-Taking Skills: Assessment Strategies | Choosing Good Lecture Material | Organization | Ideas for Presenting Lectures Assessment Ideas: Assessment is a key part of the classroom experience and it's no different with note-taking. That said, it's sometimes difficult to do this well. We want our assessments to be as near to authentic as possible which usually means giving students a quiz of some sort based upon their lecture notes. Unfortunately, one pitfall in using a quiz to assess note-taking skills is that some students will be able to answer exam questions based on their memory rather than using their notes. Fortunately, there are a couple of different ways to help minimize this problem.... Give a lecture and then give an open-note test in which their notes are collected afterward. Compare the answers from the test with the content in their notes to see if they're using the notes to answer questions. If the information from an exam question is not in the student's notes, they do not receive credit for that question. While this method may help teachers to see if a student is getting the information from their notes, it still does not rule out the possibility that they're recalling the information from memory. This approach also lacks a certain degree of authenticity since their university professors won't be collecting their notes after an exam. Some of the pitfalls discussed above can be avoided by simply delaying the exam date by a couple of weeks. Give a lecture and announce that there will be a quiz on the lecture in two weeks. Collect their notes and grade them for content, organization, and the shorthand techniques discussed earlier. Return the graded notes and wait a couple weeks before giving an open-note test. By doing this, teachers can reduce the possibility that students will be able to answer questions based on memory. This approach also has the added benefit of being more authentic in that it better mirrors the way notes are used within a typical university class. Later, as students develop their skills more, the approach above can be refined by giving a lecture, collecting and grading their notes, and then allowing a couple weeks for students to study their notes before giving a closed-note test. This approach best mirrors the format students will find within the university, and is therefore the most authentic. * Special Note: In designing questions for a note-taking quiz teachers should make sure to include questions that are based on what's directly written in the pptx or on the whiteboard, but also on what was said. Teachers can also add inference type questions based on the lecture notes to determine whether their students can comprehend and can apply the information/concepts from their notes. Up Next... Back to the beginning

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