Rickards, J. P., Fajen, B. R., Sullivan, J. F., & Gillespie, G. (1997). Signaling, notetaking, and field independence-dependence in text comprehension and recall. Journal of Educational Psychology, 89(3), 508-517.

Rickards, J.; Fajen, B.; Sullivan, J.; Gillespie, G.

1997

Rickards, J. P., Fajen, B. R., Sullivan, J. F., & Gillespie, G. (1997). Signaling, notetaking, and field independence-dependence in text comprehension and recall. Journal of Educational Psychology, 89(3), 508-517.

1

Experiment 1 involved having undergraduates take or not take notes while listening to two passages with or without signals (structural cues). When notetaking on signaled text, recall was maximized; on nonsignaled text, recall was minimized. Because notetakers appeared to rely on signals in processing text, it seemed that notetaking produced a structure-search process. Regression analyses suggested that notetaking in the presence of signals enhanced recall of field-dependent (FDs) but not field-independent learners (FIs). Experiment 2 directly examined this issue in a reading context. Increased high-level recall across passages of the same overall structure (a transfer of structure effect) was found for FIs only in the non-notetaking conditions and for the FDs only in the notetaking conditions. Thus, FIs seemed to spontaneously use a tacit structure strategy when left to their own devices and FDs appeared to immediately display powerful structuring skills when induced to do so via notetaking.

The presence of signals in the lecture presented here led to a significant increase in the amount of notetaking overall as well as in the number of notes taken on high-level (signaled) material. These results suggested that signals enhanced the structure-search, encoding process of notetaking.

40

4