Students Self-Assessing Their Class Notes Builds Critical Thinking Skills

Instructors expect students to take notes during class, but students are often unfamiliar with effective notetaking strategies. I study whether teaching students to take notes using self- assessments helps to improve student notetaking ability and aids students in understanding how to accurately evaluate their own notes. I designed a class notes assignment wherein students learned how to take notes and self-assessed their performance twice throughout an academic term. Using class notes and self-assessments from nine introduction to American politics courses with this assignment (N=194), I show that students’ notetaking ability improved during the course. Student self-assessments did tend to differ from notes grades, though the amount of improvement measured by self-assessed and graded notes was similar. The results suggest that instructors should think carefully about their expectations for student notetaking ability and consider incorporating opportunities for students to develop and assess their own notetaking strategies as part of course assignments.