PhD Sandra Wetzels: Taking notes during class not always effective

The level of prior knowledge determines what is the best way to retrieve prior knowledge from the long term memory and to use it when learning new things. Taking notes during class for example is not effective when students have little or a lot of prior knowledge. It can even be detrimental. This concludes Sandra Wetzels in her PhD research Individualised strategies for prior knowledge activation.

When students have a high level of prior knowledge the use of images is a better way to activate this knowledge than taking notes. But when students have an intermediate level of prior knowledge, taking notes is effective. Sandra Wetzels, PhD at CELSTEC, defends her PhD research 18th December 2009 at the Open Universiteit Nederland in Heerlen.

Effective use
Learning takes place in the working memory. Prior knowledge is stored in the longterm memory. Research repeatedly has shown that prior knowledge helps to understand and place new information. To activate and make use of this prior knowledge, people with little prior knowledge gather little pieces of information from different locations in the longterm memory and bring it to the working memory. This process takes effort. People with a lot of prior knowledge, can take large pieces of information at once out of the longterm memory into the working memory with little effort. "To make sure that everybody uses his prior knowledge in the most effective way, it seems important to tune the activation process to the level of prior knowledge', says Sandra Wetzels.

Animation process
Based on literature and experiments among different groups of pupils and students, Sandra Wetzels concluded among other things that taking notes while activating prior knowledge, has a positive effect for people with an average level of prior knowledge, but it works less good or even negatively for people with a low or a high level of prior knowledge. She also noted that people with a low level of prior level benefit from a broad, general instruction in order to activate prior knowledge, whereas people with a higher level of prior knwoledge benefit more from a structured approach by thinking from a certain perspective. People with a low level of prior knowledge turned out not to benefit from activating knowledge by means of images. This demands a mental animation process that demands more prior knowledge. Summarizing one can say that activating prior knowledge has a positive effect on learning, if the activation process is tuned to the level of knowledge.