In a first step, the researchers conducted a survey to gauge the student preferences in regard to lecture slides provision. They found that 87% of the 247 surveyed students would like to have the lecture slides available before the lecture. This is in line with my experience, too, and I think this is true in many other institutions. 59% of the students stated that they used the slides mainly to make additional annotations and 61% pointed out that they perceived lectures to be more difficult if they could not rely on the slides during the lecture. So, let me put this initial finding in different words: Students seem to prefer to have the slides in front of them because it allows them to make annotations which is easier and faster than relying on longhand notetaking, which in general makes the lecture easier to process.

If you are a careful reader of our blog and work, all your alarm bells should be going off right now. We know from other research in cognitive psychology that whenever learning feels easy and too fluent, we should carefully check if this is reflected in the performance later or whether this is only a short-term gain (think about massed practice versus spaced practice or testing versus rereading, just to give two examples). Thus, in order to achieve long-lasting maintenance of knowledge, it is important that studying comes with desirable difficulties and doesn’t feel too easy (3).

Using this framework together with the answers from the students, Coria and Higham designed a series of experiments that shed light on the learning benefits of the preferred notetaking strategy, annotating slides, compared to the more traditional notetaking strategy, longhand. Let’s take a closer look at two of their experiments and findings.

Experiment 1: Longhand versus Annotation versus Passive Viewing

In this experiment, participants viewed two natural sciences lectures and were either

a) given the slides as a printout to make annotations,

b) provided with a blank paper to make longhand notes, or

c) not supplied with any paper or material and just passively viewed the lecture.

Both lectures contained a number of facts as well as more conceptual information. One of the lectures was slow-paced whereas the other one was fast-paced because the researchers wanted to explore if this had an effect on the benefits of the different notetaking strategies. For example, it could be that there is an advantage for doing annotations when the lecture is fast-paced, but that longhand notes are better for slow-paced lectures. This is a valid prediction based on the desirable difficulties account, which states that the difficulties you introduce during learning should be present and pitched at the right level, but not make the intake of information an impossible task. Thus, it is likely that the right difficulty level depends on the material and the way it is presented. After viewing each of the lectures, participants were assessed on an immediate test and one week later on a delayed surprise test.

What did they find? Their key finding was that participants performed best in both tests when they took longhand notes during the lecture compared to the other two conditions. More intriguing, the group who just passively viewed the lecture performed as well as the group who were given the slides and made annotations. Whether the lecture was slow- or fast-paced did not change this result. Longhand notetaking was always more beneficial for long-term retention of knowledge than both annotated slides and passive viewing.