Cell phone ownership among student populations is approaching ubiquity and many cell phone owners interact with their devices frequently throughout the day. Since cell phones often hold the power to connect and entertain their owners at any given moment, it is possible that students' increased proximity to cell phones during a classroom lecture may lead to increased distraction from academic tasks. This study investigated whether the mere presence of a cell phone, self-reported general frequency of cell phone use, and anxiety related to being separated from one’s cell phone were related to classroom lecture outcomes. Undergraduate participants (N=72) unknowingly signed up for one of three groups: phone-on-desk, phone-under-desk, or phone-at-front-of-room. In each condition, participants were asked to take notes during a video lecture; their protocols were subsequently scored for lecture note quantity, lecture note quality, and performance on a lecture content quiz. After controlling for self-reported general cell phone use frequency and cell phone separation anxiety, results indicated participants who had their phones on their desks during the lecture wrote more complete ideas in their notes than participants who had their phones under their desks or at the front of the room. Additional analyses indicated the phone-on-desk group wrote significantly more propositions and complete ideas in their notes than the other two groups. These outcomes fall in the direction opposite to the stated hypothesis. Future investigations should consider students’ habituation to having their cell phones present and the possibility that the absence of one’s cell phone could be distracting enough to suppress academic performance.

Testing is the most common way to assess student learning at all ages and grade levels. Testing is traditionally viewed as a measure of knowledge, and not as a way to enhance learning. Nonetheless, a large body of literature demonstrates that testing is actually an effective way to facilitate learning and enhance long-term memory for information. This finding, that retrieval of information from memory leads to better retention than re-studying or re-reading the same information, has been termed the testing effect. The benefit of testing compared to review of material is typically seen after a delay between practice and final test, with review being a better strategy when the test is given immediately or after a short delay. This phenomenon has been shown across a variety of contexts, test formats, retention intervals, and ranges of ages and abilities. However, one domain in which the testing effect has not been shown to work is in the review of student-produced lecture notes. Lecture note-taking is a ubiquitous learning strategy and notes have been shown to be highly correlated with academic outcomes such as test performance and GPA. Note-taking in itself is a cognitively demanding process, and students often struggle to take accurate and complete notes from lecture, thus limiting the benefits of note-taking and review. There is limited research on ways to improve the review function of notes. Thus, this dissertation sought to understand the effect of integrating the testing effect into the context of lecture note-taking on memory for information compared to review of notes and a lecture-only control. A sample of 59 high school students watched a video lecture and took notes on the information. The lecture was divided into three sections with two-minute pauses in between each segment. During each pause, students were asked to either reread their notes from the previous section (review group), recall and write down what they remembered to be the most important ideas from the lecture they were just shown (self-testing group), or complete a distractor word search puzzle for the duration of the pause (lecture-only control group). Participants were given a written recall test of lecture information following a one-day delay. Comparisons were made between lecture groups on test performance and note quantity. Measures of sustained attention and mind-wandering during lecture were examined as covariates. While participants in the self-testing group scored higher on the written recall test, this difference did not reach statistical significance. Self-testing and reviewing notes during lecture pauses were both significantly better than lecture note-taking alone. Results also showed that it was actually the students in the review group who took significantly more notes than those in the lecture-only control. There was a main effect for time, indicating that students in all lecture groups took increasingly more notes as the lecture progressed. Note quantity was found to be a significant predictor of test performance. Examination of attentional variables showed that students who reported lower instances of mind-wandering took significantly more notes and did significantly better on the recall test. Further, students in the self-testing group reported less of an increase in mind-wandering as the lecture progressed compared to those in the control group. Differences between the results of this study and other studies in the testing effect literature are hypothesized to be due several factors, including complexity of lecture information, encoding difficulties, and the presentation of new information at each self-testing time point. Future research should continue to explore the testing effect in conjunction with note taking.

The effects of note-taking on self-disclosure during a clinical interview among prisoners were investigated. Participants consisted of 60 male and female inmates incarcerated in a minimum security prison. Subjects within each gender were randomly assigned to either high note-taking, low note-taking or no note-taking conditions. Subjects were asked to discuss intimate information during an interview while varying levels of notes were taken. Self-disclosure was assessed using items from the Rotter Incomplete Sentences Blank. A 3 x 2 ANOVA was conducted. No significant main effects were found. However, a significant interaction was found. Further analysis revealed that females in the high note-taking condition disclosed less than females in the no note-taking condition. Some theoretical and clinical implications are suggested.

Classroom testing has historically been viewed as a method to evaluate knowledge. However, a growing body of literature underscores the idea that testing can be used for more than just assessing students competencies. In fact, the act of taking a test itself has proven to provide meaningful effects on learning and long-term retention. The idea that repeated testing enhances long-term retention has been dubbed the testing effect. In a variety of settings, research has established that compared to rereading or reviewing, practicing retrieval through repeated testing leads to poorer performance on immediate tests but superior long-term memory on delayed tests. To date, the testing effect has not been examined in conjunction with student-generated materials, such as lecture note taking. Lecture note taking is ubiquitous in postsecondary education, and students view it as an important classroom activity. Note taking, however, is a very complicated and multi-faceted process, which often leads students to take poor or incomplete notes. Professors have recognized this difficulty and begun providing their own, more completed, elaborated, and well organized notes to students in an effort to compensate for their incomplete notes. This dissertation examined whether repeated recall is superior to repeated review for the retention of information when students study their own notes vs. the instructor’s notes. A sample of 117 undergraduate students watched a recorded lecture while half of them took notes, and the other half received the instructor’s notes. Students then studied the notes through repeated review or repeated recall before taking either an immediate or final test on the materials. The independent variables included note-taking (own notes vs. instructor’s notes), review (repeated rereading/reviewing vs. repeated recall/testing), and time of test (immediate vs. delayed). The dependent variables included total test score, performance on memory items, and performance on inference items. Results of this study did not find a testing effect. Rather, the outcome found a significant main effect for time of test across dependent variables (memory items, inference items, total test score), indicating that students performed better on the immediate test than the delayed test. There was a significant study method x time of test interaction, demonstrating that students’ in the review condition performed better on the immediate than the delayed test but only on memory items. No significant interaction was found for the recall condition. There was also a trend for students to perform better on memory items when they repeatedly reviewed rather than recalled the instructor’s provided notes, however the method x notes interaction did not reach conventional levels of significance. Differences between the results of this study and those from other testing effect research are hypothesized to be due to the repetitive and lengthy of nature of this experiment and the lack of student interest and motivation. Future research should continue to explore the testing effect in conjunction with note taking.