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Interactive Learning Environments
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/nile20
How collaboration influences the effect of note-
taking on writing performance and recall of
contents
Mik Fanguy, Matthew Baldwin, Evgeniia Shmeleva, Kyungmee Lee & Jamie
Costley
To cite this article: Mik Fanguy, Matthew Baldwin, Evgeniia Shmeleva, Kyungmee Lee & Jamie
Costley (2021): How collaboration influences the effect of note-taking on writing performance and
recall of contents, Interactive Learning Environments, DOI: 10.1080/10494820.2021.1950772
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2021.1950772
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How collaboration influences the effect of note-taking on writing
performance and recall of contents
Mik Fanguy
a
, Matthew Baldwin
b
, Evgeniia Shmeleva
c
, Kyungmee Lee
d
and
Jamie Costley
c
a
EFL Department, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST);
b
EFL Program, School of
Humanities and Social Sciences, KAIST;
c
National Research University Higher School of Economics, Institute of
Education;
d
Lancaster University, The Department of Educational Research
ABSTRACT
Note-taking is a commonly applied pedagogical strategy across all areas
of education. In higher education specifically, there has been an
increasing push to get students involved in collaborative note-taking in
order to increase their engagement with the contents and to inspire
deeper and more meaningful learning. However, there is a lack of
clarity as to whether collaborative note-taking positively influences
student performance. For this reason, the present study (n = 189)
compares the learning performances of students in a collaborative
note-taking condition to those of students in an individual note-taking
condition. The students were compared in regards to their retention of
information and their performance on academic writing. The study
found that students from the collaborative note-taking group
performed better on measures of retention, while the individual note-
taking group performed better on measures of academic writing. These
results suggest that while the collaborative processes of group note-
taking lead students to retain more information, these processes do not
lead to better performance in academic writing. The present study fills a
gap in the research by showing how the effectiveness of collaborative
note-taking might depend on the learning context or on the desired
result of the class.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 8 May 2021
Accepted 28 June 2021
KEYWORDS
Collaborative note-taking;
collaborative writing; higher
education; retention
Introduction
As collaborative learning has been a prevalent pedagogical approach since the 1980s, the current
generation of instructors may see collaboration as a positive pedagogical approach suitable for
most, if not all, learning contexts (Menekse & Chi, 2019;O’Donnell, 2006). More specifically, collab-
oration is a commonly-used practice in higher education, where it has been integrated into curricula
across disciplines within both online and traditional on-campus classrooms (Nokes-Malach et al.,
2015). This is because much research into collaboration in higher learning environments suggests
it is of benefit to learners (Johnson et al., 2014). However, in spite of its ubiquitous implementation
and a body of extant literature in its favor, questions remain regarding the inconsistent effectiveness
of collaboration on learning (Kester & Paas, 2005; Zambrano et al., 2019). For this reason, much
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the
original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
CONTACT Jamie Costley jcostley@hse.ru National Research University Higher School of Economics, Institute of Education
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
INTERACTIVE LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS
https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2021.1950772
research in the field of education is focused on investigating the differing topics, contexts, and edu-
cational modalities that might be more or less appropriate for collaboration (Retnowati et al., 2017).
The act of individuals taking notes in lectures is a proven strategy that is deemed an essential
approach to learning (van de Sande et al., 2017). This importance manifests itself in improved
student learning and performance in class (Luo et al., 2018). Furthermore, engaging in note-
taking correlates with achievement (Fisher & Harris, 1973; van de Sande et al., 2017) because of
better retention and recall (Fisher & Harris, 1973; Rickards & Friedman, 1978), increased attention
to material (Kane et al., 2017; Kiewra, 1987), and the memory benefits, i.e. storage and encoding,
that come from recording the notes (Peverly & Wolf, 2019). For these reasons, note-taking is preva-
lent with students participating in offline and online classes (Liu et al., 2019; Veletsianos et al., 2015).
Some researchers have suggested that collaborative note-taking in particular might be more
effective than taking notes individually (Harbin, 2020). This is because it may be the case that
note-taking places a cognitive burden on learners, which might be better resolved when working
in a group rather than individually (Chen et al., 2021). The cognitive challenge of trying to compre-
hend, process, and record information may be divided among group members, allowing students to
retain more of the information from collaborative note-taking (Orndorff,2015; Shi et al., 2020). If lear-
ners share the workload of note-taking among a group, individual members’cognitive capacities will
be freed up, leading to higher levels of learning (Kirschner et al., 2018).
Because of the potential benefits of collaborative note-taking, some universities actively encou-
rage instructors to promote collaborative note-taking (Laudari, 2019). Therefore, researchers have
started to investigate how effective collaborative note-taking is and in what contexts it can be
most readily applied (Veletsianos et al., 2016). Much of the research into the area of collaborative
note-taking is based on perceived learning as self-reported by students and instructors, not grounded
in class assessment or direct measures of performance. Regardless, such research has shaped the
discussion on collaborative learning’sefficacy and led to its widespread use. Consequently, more
needs to be known about whether collaborative learning is suitable in the context of note-taking,
and the present study seeks to develop a more nuanced empirical discussion of the topic.
Literature review
Student note-taking in the context of higher education is seen to be an effective strategy to improve
student learning (Wu, 2020). Aside from the benefits of taking notes for oneself, there has been
research that suggests sharing notes, and taking or reviewing notes in groups is also beneficial.
Kiewra (1989) found that those who borrowed notes from attendees that did not attend the
lecture themselves performed similarly on assessment measures to those who originally took and
reviewed the notes. Luo et al. (2016) found that students who collaborated with a partner to
revise their notes, recorded more original and complete information. In the case of an offline syn-
chronous class, students who participated in a collaborative note-taking condition using shared
Google Documents achieved on average a letter grade higher than their peers in the control
group who took the same course (Orndorff,2015). In an asynchronous online learning environment,
Balwin et al. (2019) saw better learning outcomes for group note-takers than those in the control
group, who were advised to take notes individually. However, a key limitation in both of the
studies (Baldwin et al., 2019; Orndorff,2015) is that the researchers only monitored and examined
the collaborative note-taking documents. Consequently, it is unknown how much note-taking
members of the control group actually did. In these cases, it is possible that the learning effects
of collaborative note-taking were compared to the effects when no notes were taken at all.
In regards to the amount students write when they take notes and their learning performance,
there is a large corpus of research literature showing a positive relationship between the quantity
of words in students’written notes and their learning outcomes (Haynes et al., 2015; Kiewra,
1987). Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014) found that the number of words in students’notes was
positively correlated with their ability to recall concepts from lectures they attended. Consequently,
2M. FANGUY ET AL.
volume has been regarded in the literature as an important measure of the quality of the notes stu-
dents take. Research has shown that collaborative note-takers take a larger volume of notes than
individual note-takers and tend to perform better on related exams (Kam et al., 2005), and it has
been suggested that increased volume in collaborative notes may help students generate more
ideas on the topics being focused on (Adeniran et al., 2019; Doberstein et al., 2019). However,
more voluminous notes may not always be best, as Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014) also found
that increased word counts correlated with reduced learning in cases where notes were written
as word-for-word transcriptions of the lectures. In such cases, students may become overburdened
with trying to copy down every word being spoken rather than thinking critically about the lecture
concepts and encoding those ideas to their working memories.
Collaboration has been shown to have a variety of effects depending on learning contexts. Col-
laboration in small groups has enabled greater academic achievement (Menekse & Chi, 2019;O’Don-
nell, 2006) and better learning outcomes (Le et al., 2013). However, while reviewing group versus
individual work in a classroom setting, evidence for collaborative learning’sefficacy is mixed and
provides some evidence that those in a group perform worse than they would have alone
(Nokes-Malach et al., 2015; Retnowati et al., 2017). Included in that review is evidence of students’
positive attitudes toward working in groups and the belief that their learning was of a higher stan-
dard than when they worked alone. Crucially though, the group members did not perform as well as
those who studied individually (Leidner & Fuller, 1997). The outcome of the effect, therefore, does
not always equate to what it is perceived to be.
Retention of learned information is an important aspect of education as a student needs to store
course material in long-term memory in a manner that allows it to be called upon at a future time
(Roediger & Karpicke, 2018). There is evidence that working together can aid retention of learning
material (Johnson et al., 2014). Collaboration has been seen to help those within a group retain
more class material when the individuals divide up a task and concentrate on different parts
(Tindale & Winget, 2017), whereas a meta-analysis by Marion and Thorley (2016) found that
working together in groups to memorize can help individuals recall information by themselves
later. It is worth noting that according to the encoding hypothesis, which relates to note-taking
directly, the act of note-taking in itself assists learning and the remembering of information.
However, dividing the task of note-taking among members of a group may reduce this positive
effect for each individual. This leads to two key questions: (1) How important is encoding? and (2)
If during collaboration, encoding is diminished, can this be countered by a potentially improved
product (storage) for the group members to review from?
Conversely, there are occasions when working together is detrimental to recall. The Retrieval
Strategy Disruption Hypothesis (Basden et al., 1997), whereby the output of one group member
impedes the retrieval processes of another, is an oft-given reason why collaborative inhibition
occurs (Marion & Thorley, 2016). The group consequently retrieves less information than individuals,
as collaboration may disrupt learners’ability to construct their own knowledge (Abel & Bäuml, 2017).
Further disruption to retention has been noted in the form of cognitive transactional costs (Kirschner
et al., 2009) - the mental time and effort spent assisting or listening to others in the group - expend-
able resources that might be better employed in learning the material by oneself.
Despite the cognitive transactional cost as well as retrieval strategy disruption, the act of working
in groups has the potential to aid practice and performance of a task. Through the activity itself,
participants in a group may recognize gaps in their own learning and seek guidance from their
peers (Doo et al., 2020;Shinetal.,2020). Those more knowledgeable about a subject may give infor-
mation or suggestions, such as ways to approach a goal or an explanation for information another
student finds confusing. In these ways, collaboration facilitates scaffolding–that is, it enables group
members to do that which they could not have done without the assistance of others (Vygotsky, 1978).
Transfer of learning, often seen as the goal of learning, is the application of knowledge one has
acquired in the past, to a new, similar context (Pan & Rickard, 2018). A typical practice in higher edu-
cation is for instructors to convey new theory or knowledge in the classroom and have students
INTERACTIVE LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS 3
practically apply it to a problem or scenario. In this regard, unstructured/structured small-group
learning has been found to have a positive effect on students’later individual attempts at learning
transfer (Pai et al., 2015). Doing group activities provides an opportunity to practice a skill; however,
how the task is divided between members could restrict that opportunity. An instance where this can
be crucial is second language learning (L2), and in particular when learning to write in an L2. The
intricacies of academic writing dictate that a L2 learner needs to practice the different writing
skills through individual experience (Myles, 2002). Observing someone else conducting a writing
skill in a group is not the equivalent of performing it oneself, first hand. This lack of application
could diminish the positive effect that practice alone has on accuracy in essay writing (Robb
et al., 1986).
The present study
The present study seeks to measure and compare the learning effects of two approaches to note-
taking in a course featuring online video instruction: (1) individual note-taking, wherein each
student is responsible for recording his/her own set of notes, and (2) collaborative note-taking,
wherein students are responsible for taking notes collaboratively in shared online documents in
small groups. To do so, participants were divided into two groups, with one group taking notes indi-
vidually and the other taking notes collaboratively in small groups. As prior experimental studies on
collaborative note-taking (Baldwin et al., 2019; Orndorff,2015) have not monitored the amount of
notes that were taken in the control (non-collaborative) condition, in the present study, students’
online note-taking documents from the individual and collaborative note-taking conditions were
created and monitored by the course instructor. In this way, the amount of notes taken by students
from each condition could be assessed. Learning outcomes were measured in two ways. Students’
ability to recall contents from the online lecture videos were measured through their individual
scores on online quizzes, as quizzes are widely acknowledged as a useful measure of learners’com-
prehension of learning content (Herold et al., 2012; Kamuche, 2011). Students’writing ability, which
is the focus of the scientific writing course examined in this study, was assessed by evaluation of their
individual writing assignments. This study seeks to answer the following research questions:
RQ1: Does collaborative note-taking increase students’recall of course concepts from lecture videos as com-
pared to individual note-taking?
RQ2: Does collaborative note-taking increase students’writing ability as compared to individual note-taking?
RQ3: Do individual note-takers write more than collaborative note-takers?
The study has three main hypotheses:
H1: Students in the collaborative group will earn higher scores on related quizzes than students taking notes
individually.
H2: Students in the collaborative group will earn higher scores on individual writing assignments than students
in the individual note-taking condition.
H3: The volume of notes taken by individual note-takers will be higher than that of constituent members of col-
laborative note-taking groups.
Methodology
Participants and learning context
There were 186 students engaged in online note-taking in 10 different course sections of a graduate
scientific writing course at a Korean university. All students who enrolled in the course were majoring
in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields. There were 8–25 students in each
4M. FANGUY ET AL.
course section. Each of the 189 students joined sections (classes) that were designated as either indi-
vidual or group note-taking. There were 6 sections designated as collaborative and 4 as individual
note-taking. Within the group note-taking condition, there were 27 groups with 3, 4, or 5
members. 128 subjects were masters students, and 58 were in a doctoral program. There were 48
females and 138 males. The average age of the students was 25.5 (SD = 2.5), with a minimum
value 22 and a maximum value 36.
The participants were divided into two groups, with one being a collaborative note-taking group
(64 students) and the other being an individual note-taking group (123 students) with a similar com-
position of gender and age. The group participants did not differ significantly by gender (Χ2(1)
= .639, p= .424), age (t = −0.907, p= .365), or educational level as approximated by the pre-test
quizzes (t = .998, p= .319). The pre-test was a 10-item quiz given at the start of the semester. This
pre-test consisted of items from each of the weekly topics that the course covered to see the stu-
dents’level of knowledge of the information covered in the course.
In the scientific writing course that was the focus of this study, graduate students learn to write a
manuscript on their research findings for publication in an academic journal (Fanguy et al., 2021).
Course lectures were provided as online videos on the course learning management system in
streaming format. The course comprises 10 instructional weeks, and each week includes 4–8
lecture videos, with a total of 56 videos for the course. The average duration of the videos was
approximately 12 min, with the shortest video being 4:56 and the longest video lasting 24:50.
During each instructional week, learners were also requested to take notes on the video contents.
Students in the individual note-taking group were asked to take notes individually, while students in
the collaborative note-taking group were asked to do so in small groups of 3–5 students, which stu-
dents were allowed to self-select into (with instructions to try to keep groups to 4 or 5 students). The
notes that were taken by students in each treatment condition were taken using Google Documents
that were created and monitored by the professor teaching the course. Therefore, in the individual
note-taking group, each student in the course took notes in 10 individual Google Documents that
corresponded to the 10 weeks of course instruction. Similarly, in collaborative note-taking groups,
each group took notes in 10 shared Google Documents that corresponded to the 10 weeks of
course instruction. As the course videos were provided on the course learning management
system, students in both treatment groups could access the videos as often as they desired and
could rewind, pause, or fast-forward while note-taking. At the end of each week of instruction, all
learners were given an online quiz covering the learning content covered in the course videos of
that week. The instructor of the course encouraged all students from both conditions to refer to
the notes they had written on the online lecture videos when taking the related quiz. The quizzes
covered a variety of topics discussed in the lecture videos including academic writing conventions,
ethical issues related to the communication of scientific research, and navigation of the submission
and peer review process of academic journals. Such topics were deemed by the course instructor to
be appropriate to be assessed with quizzes. From the notes that students wrote in each of the two
treatment conditions, data was mined for the volume of words written.
Measures
Volume. The number of words contributed by each student to the final version of each of 10 note-
taking documents during the semester was tallied, and this sum served as the volume variable in this
study. In the individual note-taking group, the total number of words written in all note-taking docu-
ments was used as the volume variable. In the collaborative note-taking group, the total number of
words contributed to all of the collaborative note-taking documents by each constituent group
member served as the volume variable. In order to operationalize the volume variable, the total
word count of each document was assessed using a program written in Python language (URL
removed for blinding).
INTERACTIVE LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS 5
Quiz scores. A total of 10 quizzes were given online during the semester in order to measure stu-
dents’recall and understanding the content from video lectures during each of the 10 instructional
weeks. Each quiz consisted of 8–30 multiple-choice items based on the concepts of the online videos
from the corresponding instructional week. Students were given only one attempt to take each quiz,
and quiz attempts were timed with two minutes allowed for each question. Students were required
to take each quiz by 6 pm on the Friday of each instructional week. The quiz items were designed to
allow for more than one answer choice to be selected, and students were awarded partial credit
when fewer than the total number of correct options were selected. However, if an incorrect
answer option was selected, a score of 0 was given for the quiz item in order to discourage students
from indiscriminately guessing when they did not understand the learning content being measured.
The scores of each quiz were weighted equally in order to account for 3% of the course grade point
total. Therefore, the total 10 quiz scores, each of which was worth 3% of the grade total, were com-
bined to account for 30% of the grade point total for the course. The Cronbach’s(1951) alpha coeffi-
cients for the respective weekly quiz scores were as follows: a= .68, .62, .60, .69, .81, .64, .78, .58, .65,
and .85. These results indicate that the quizzes provided a moderately reliable measure of the learn-
ing content of each instructional week. More information about each quiz item and its relationship to
the instruction can be viewed at the following URL under the label of “quiz items and video list”: URL
removed for blinding.
Individual writing assignments
The scientific writing course examined in the present study required students to submit five individ-
ual writing assignments corresponding to six major sections of a research article: Introduction, Meth-
odology, Results, Discussion & Conclusion, Abstract, and References. Each of these assignments were
evaluated using rubrics (Appendix A) that were adapted from those proposed by Clabough and Cla-
bough (2016) and were scored by the course instructor on a scale of 0-10, with each assignment
accounting for 10% and all six assignments accounting for 60% of the course grade point total.
The summed scores of these six assignments were used as the individual writing variable in the
present study. To ensure reliability of rating, two instructors of the scientific writing course separately
rated 10 randomly selected writing samples as part of a norming session and discussed instances
where differences in scoring occurred. After acceptable scoring calibration was achieved, the two
instructors simultaneously scored 20% of all writing samples submitted from all 6 sections of the
course being examined.
Survey. Furthermore, the students took a survey at the completion of the course. The survey was
administered to both treatment groups in the present study. Survey items covered various topics
including, student demographics, the usefulness of notes, the effectiveness of the Google Docu-
ments platform, and video viewing practices and habits. Two survey items of interest to the
present study were analyzed to see how they differed between the individual and group note-
taking condition: I always watched all the course videos, and Taking notes made me more likely to
rewatch parts or all of a given course video. These were Likert-like items from 1 - 7 which asked stu-
dents to respond to either “very true of me”which was a 7, to “not at all true of me,”which was a
1. These items both represent the way students interact with the materials in the course in relation to
their note-taking and therefore will help add to our understanding of the differing note-taking beha-
viors of the participants in the individual and collaborative note-taking conditions.
Results
Before comparing the treatment groups by learning outcomes, we used the Shapiro–Wilk test to test
the assumption of normality of data distribution and Levene’s test to test the assumption of equal
variances (homoscedasticity). The results indicated that both assumptions hold for weekly quizzes
scores (F = .31, p= .579 for Levene’s test, and W = 0.99, p= .304 for the Shapiro–Wilk test), but do
6M. FANGUY ET AL.
not hold for individual writing assignments (F = 4.85, p= .028 and W = 0.95, p< .000, respectively).
Therefore, we used a parametric t-test to check the significance of the differences in quizzes
scores and a nonparametric Mann–Whitney Utest to check the significance of the differences in indi-
vidual assignment scores.
The results show (Tables 1–2) that the collaborative note-taking group had a 1.38 higher average
weekly quiz scores than the individual note-taking group (hypothesis 1 is held), and this difference
was statistically significant (t = −3.67; p< .000). A comparison of the individual written assessment
scores reveals that the collaborative note-taking group had a 3.08 lower writing scores than the indi-
vidual note-taking group, and this difference was statistically significant (z = 5.25; p< .000). This pro-
vides evidence for the rejection of hypothesis 2.
We use the information about how students interacted with the materials to explain the differ-
ences in learning outcomes in the individual and group note-taking conditions –(1) volume of
notes, (2) watching all the videos during the course, and (3) rewatching parts of the videos during
the course. All the variables fail the Shapiro–Wilk test for normality (W = .83, p= .000 for the first vari-
able, W = 0.81, p= .000 for the second one, and W = .93, p= .000 for the third one). Only the variable
indicating watching all the videos during the course passes the test for homoscedasticity (F = 2.76, p
= 0.097). The assumptions for homoscedasticity for the first and the third variables do not hold (F =
55.70, p= .000 and F = 7.50, p= .006, respectively). Therefore, we use a nonparametric Mann–
Whitney Utest to check the significance of the differences in individual assignment scores.
As detailed in Table 3, the individual note-taking group had a 3582.97 significantly higher volume
of notes (z = 7.82; p< .000; hypothesis 3 is held), a .34 higher score on the variable indicating watch-
ing all the course videos (z = 2.11; p= .034), and a .67 higher score on the variable indicating rewatch-
ing the videos (z = 2.41; p= .015) than the individual note-taking group. These results suggest
students from individual note-taking groups interacted with the course materials more than stu-
dents from the other treatment group.
Discussion
The students who were in the collaborative condition in the present study performed better on the
weekly quizzes than those in the individual condition. These quizzes provided a measure of the stu-
dent’s retention of materials from the course’s online video lectures (Roediger & Karpicke, 2018). The
present study falls in line with other research that suggests that collaboration benefits students
learning generally (Johnson et al., 2014), as well as retention of information specifically (Marion &
Thorley, 2016). On the other hand, previous studies have suggested that collaboration may interrupt
a learner’s ability to retain and recall information and may also introduce a cognitive transaction cost
to completing the task as a group (Marsh & Rajaram, 2019), as learners must spend time and mental
effort in order to share information with one another. Moreover, when an individual group member
contributes dominantly to a learning task, other members may not get ample opportunities to
engage, which may hinder their learning (Hew & Brush, 2007). This may also have occurred in the
present study, as the amount of notes contributed was not always evenly balanced among group
members in the collaborative note-taking condition. However, while there may be some collabora-
tive inhibition, transaction costs, and unequal participation from the learner-to-learner interaction,
the present findings suggest that the benefits of reducing students’cognitive burden as well as
Table 1. The gender, age, and pre-tests results of the participants, N= 186
Gender Frequency Percent Age (Mean / SD) Pre-test quiz results (Mean / SD)
Individual note-taking group (N=63) Female 14 22.22 25.14 / 2.79 5.15 / 1.20
Male 49 77.78 25.36 / 2.37 5.23 / 1.27
Collaborative note-taking group
(N=123)
Female 34 27.64 25.11 / 1.90 5.36 / 1.38
Male 89 72.36 25.88 / 2.78 4.87 / 1.62
INTERACTIVE LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS 7
the increased amount of focus collaboration brings outweigh the aforementioned disadvantages of
collaboration.
The students who took notes individually outperformed the students who took collaborative
notes in regards to their performance on academic writing. These pieces of writing were the main
focus of the course and involved students completing an individual paper related to their own
area of research interest. The present study’s results do not support research that shows that collab-
oration can help students notice gaps in their knowledge and allows scaffolding and feedback from
other learners (Doo et al., 2020). However, the present study’s results do correspond to those of
Leidner and Fuller (1997), who found that although students who worked in collaborative groups
expressed more interest in the learning content and perceived learning, while students who
worked individually exhibited better learning performance. Leidner and Fuller explained this
result by surmising that learning activities done by oneself allow the learner to process information
in a way that allows them to understand the information more deeply and apply skills from that pro-
cessing at a later time. Similarly, students in the individual note-taking condition of the present study
may have benefited from processing information on their own rather than in groups.
Several other variables were considered after the main hypotheses were investigated. The volume
of the individual note-taking and collaborative note-taking conditions were compared, and this
showed that individual note-takers took more than twice the amount of notes (in terms of word
Table 2. Student outcomes, t-test, and Mann-Whitney U test for the individual note-taking group and the collaborative note-
taking group
Weekly quiz scores Individual writing assignment scores
Individual note-taking group (N=63)
Mean 20.51 44.63
SD 2.44 3.16
Collaborative note-taking group (N=123)
Mean 21.89 41.55
SD 2.42 4.12
Test for differences
Mean difference −1.38 3.08
tvalue
a
−3.67
zvalue
b
5.25
pvalue 0.00 0.00
Total (N=186)
Mean 21.43 42.59
SD 2.51 4.08
Notes: a –t-test; b–Mann-Whitney Utest
Table 3. The means of the parameters of the course participation and Mann-Whitney U test for the individual note-taking group
and the collaborative note-taking group
Volume of
notes
Watching all the course
videos
Rewatching parts or all of a given course
video.
Individual note-taking group
(N=63)
Mean 6269.41 6.49 5.61
SD 3321.39 0.89 1.18
Collaborative note-taking group
(N=123)
Mean 2686.43 6.15 4.94
SD 1417.20 1.18 1.72
Test for differences
Mean difference 3582.97 0.34 0.67
zvalue 7.82 2.11 2.41
pvalue 0.000 0.034 0.015
Total (N=186)
Mean 3900.02 6.26 5.17
SD 2812.93 1.10 1.59
8M. FANGUY ET AL.
count) than collaborative note-takers. This finding seems intuitive as the collaborative note-takers
are sharing the amount of notes required for each class, leading them to write less individually.
This is of pedagogical importance because, if students practice a skill less, they will not perform
as well as those who have practiced the skill more (Robb et al., 1986). The present study supports
this and suggests that even though collaboration is often used as an instructional activity to encou-
rage students’practice, it may in fact lead to less individual practice of the skill being applied. This is
particularly salient in the case where the skill being practiced either in a group or individually is close
in kind to the outcome variable of interest. In the case of the present study, academic writing and
note-taking are similar in that they are both writing. It has been demonstrated that when learners
are trying to improve their second language, practice is of great importance (Nalliveettil & Mahasneh,
2017). This suggests that the better results in regards to writing found for the individual note-takers
may be caused by those learners having more practice of the skills that the class is focused on as
compared to the collaborative note-takers.
Also, to further understand the differences found in the main variables of interest, two survey
items of interest were assessed. The students were asked “how true it was of them”that they
“always watched all the course videos.”In this regard, students in the individual note-taking con-
dition had higher average scores, meaning that they were more likely to watch all the videos. Fur-
thermore, the students were asked “how true it was of them”that “Taking notes made me more
likely to rewatch parts or all of a given course video.”In this case, the individual note-takers also
scored higher on average than the collaborative note-takers. There are two possible explanations
for this: (1) that students who took individual notes were more focused because they were respon-
sible for taking notes for all the course videos without help from others, or (2) students in the col-
laborative condition felt that they did not need to watch all the videos as they had access to
peer-created notes. This shows that what is seen as an advantage in collaborative learning (distri-
bution of workload) may cause potential issues as it may lead to students being less engaged
with the course materials.
It should be noted that the issues with collaboration discovered in this study’s results are a little
different from the “free-rider effect”noted in the literature (Strijbos & De Laat, 2010). In the free-
rider effect, students rely on others within a group to help complete a group activity. This may or
may not have occurred in the present study; however, it may be the case that regardless of stu-
dents’performance in collaborative activities, students will interact less with the course materials
because the nature of collaboration leads to fewer requirements for them to engage with the con-
tents. So while prior work on the free-rider effect describes it as an individual member gaining
benefits from group labor with minimal contribution (Strijbos & De Laat, 2010), the present
study suggests that such an approach may come at the expense of the individual’s own learning
outcomes. While prior studies on free-riding have tended to focus on self-reported perceived levels
of learning and satisfaction with collaboration among group members, the present study has
measured the individual learning performances of the members, providing useful insights into
the effects of free-riding. This shows how the present study distinguishes itself from previous
research and gives a more focused, in-depth understanding of collaboration’seffect on student
performance.
Pedagogical recommendations
This study finds that more nuance is required when applying collaborative learning in an online
setting. Generally speaking, there is a tendency to consider that more collaboration is always
better (Menekse & Chi, 2019;O’Donnell, 2006). However, the present study finds this is not the
case. As can be seen from the results, while collaboration was beneficial for the students’retention
of information, it was better for the student’s academic writing to write notes individually. The over-
arching pedagogical recommendation that can be drawn from this is that context and objectives
play a large part in determining if collaborative learning should be implemented. Therefore, there
INTERACTIVE LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS 9
are four more specific pedagogical recommendations: (1) When retention is important, collaborative
note-taking is effective; (2) academic writing will show greater improvement if students work indi-
vidually on note-taking; (3) more writing practice will help with student writing performance; and
(4) group activities should be systematically designed to promote effective collaboration.
The first recommendation is that collaboration has great benefit in instances where the goal of
instruction is to help students better understand and recall concepts and information. Collabora-
tive activities where group members attempt to collectively record and build knowledge will
help to deepen their understanding of course concepts and improve retention. This occurs
because students can share the burden of recording information, which can free cognitive
resources to make deeper connections with the content (Costley & Fanguy, 2021). Collaborative
note-taking from this perspective is situational. When the course goals are focused around building
knowledge as opposed to practicing a particular skill then collaborative note-taking can be a good
pedagogical practice.
The second recommendation is that academic writing is a skill that requires practice from stu-
dents in order to improve and gain mastery (Johari, 2018; Myles, 2002; Nalliveettil & Mahasneh,
2017; Silliman et al., 2020). Therefore, academic writing courses should include substantial writing
assignments that require students to invest time and effort engaging in the writing process. The
third and perhaps more surprising recommendation of the present study is that such assignments
should be completed individually rather than in collaborative groups because students will gain
more practice when the practice afforded by the task is not shared among several members, but
is instead assigned to a single learner.
The fourth recommendation of the present study is that when instructors include collaborative
learning activities into their courses, care must be taken to ensure that the proper conditions
exist for meaningful collaboration to occur (Ellis & Han, 2020). For example, a prior study found
that members of a group that collaborated through a shared online instructional interface exhibited
higher levels of recall on a test than students in the control condition who studied offline in a non-
collaborative manner (Szewkis et al., 2011). The authors noted that for successful collaborative learn-
ing to occur, there are a number of necessary conditions: sharing a common goal, positive interde-
pendence among members, coordination and communication, individual accountability, awareness
of peers’work, and joint rewards. The fact that the online collaborative note-taking condition in the
present study contained all of these conditions may help to explain the similarity of the present
findings to those of Szewkis et al. Because students were able to use the notes they created in
their groups in order to study for the weekly quizzes, they had a clear common goal, which also
helped to create a sense of interdependence or reliance on one another. Groups had to decide
amongst themselves how to divide the work and create the notes, but individuals could be held
accountable for their contribution since each group member, as well as the course instructor,
could clearly see who wrote each part of the notes. Therefore, members were aware of the contri-
butions or lack thereof of each member. Lastly, student groups who took high-quality notes
shared in the joint reward or benefit of having a highly complete set of notes with which to
study for quizzes.
Aside from the specific case of note-taking and academic writing, the study results also emphasize
a more generalizable concept at play in collaborative learning situations. In many cases, collabor-
ation may lead to students engaging in less practice of a skill than they would if they were to
apply the skill on their own. While the underlying processes of collaborative learning might lead
them to enjoy the processes more and perhaps to retain the information better if they collaborate,
they will not have the ability to actively engage in the skill they are trying to develop. A simple
analogy may help to illustrate. Imagine students are learning how to do Cardiopulmonary Resuscita-
tion (CPR) on a practice dummy. In one case, there is a group of four learning this skill while sharing
one dummy, and in another case, an individual is practicing alone on one dummy. The group may
enjoy the process of learning how to do CPR due to interactions with their partners, and the pro-
cesses of collaboration may lead them to remember the steps of procedure better than the
10 M. FANGUY ET AL.
individual. However, the individual has four times the amount of time on task to practice on the
dummy. This analogy may help to demonstrate what is happening in the present study and in
other cases of collaboration: collaborative groups may have better understood and remembered
many of the concepts from the course due to their interactions with one another, but individual
note-takers did five times as much writing to complete their notes and therefore gained valuable
writing practice. For this reason, careful consideration must be given to the type of contents that
the students are learning and whether the relative value of collaboration is outweighed by the les-
sening amount of practice the students will engage in.
Conclusion
This study compared the students’performances in online classes in both weekly quizzes and aca-
demic writing. The students were divided into a condition where they took notes individually, or in
collaborative groups. The results show that students in the collaborative condition performed better
on the quizzes, while the students in the individual note-taking condition performed better on the
writing tasks. This study provides new insights into how note-taking affects student performance
from a collaborative perspective. Previous studies have tended to look at either collaborative
note-taking or individual note-taking by themselves, and have not compared them as our study
has done.
The present study also brings a more balanced narrative into the recent conversations on the
effectiveness of collaborative learning activities for individual student learning performance.
Advanced communication technologies have enabled researchers and educators to realize the
social constructivist ideal of student learning as a collaborative knowledge construction process
in different pedagogical settings. A growing volume of literature has documented the positive
sides of computer-supported collaborative learning and associated challenges to implementing
those activities in classrooms. As the scholarship has been established and mature, we argue it
has reached its tipping point where more research efforts need to be exerted to develop a com-
prehensive account of the effects of collaborative learning activities across different subject matters
and intended learning outcomes. Learning is multi-focal endeavors, strongly influenced by the
nature of a focused set of knowledge and skills. When it comes to the question of effective ped-
agogical approaches, therefore, the answers vary across disciplines and different stages of learner
development. In that regard, this particular study contributes to adding nuance to the literature by
showing that while collaboration may be an effective tool at improving the retention of lecture
contents, it reduces the amount of academic writing practice a student might engage in. That
is, those in the individual note-taking condition wrote twice as much as those in the collaborative
condition.
Despite these contributions, the present study has a number of limitations that must be
addressed. The first is that the only aspect of the notes that was assessed was volume. However,
the quality of the notes, for example how many of the main concepts from the lectures are
written down, is another important aspect of note-taking quality that was not assessed. It is possible
that the improved retention of course concepts by the collaborative note-takers could have been
due to creating and having access to higher quality notes than those of individual note-takers;
however, as this study did not measure quality, such a relationship cannot be examined. Therefore,
future research should evaluate and compare the quality of notes taken between individual and col-
laborative note-takers. A second limitation is that this study used self-reported information from
survey items in order to assess students’video viewing habits, and clickstream behavior would
have been a more effective method of doing so. As clickstream data was unavailable from the uni-
versity learning management system, future research should examine the relationship between col-
laborative note-taking and the tendency to view videos. Considering the ubiquitousness of note-
taking and benefits to be gained from collaboration, this is an area that is rich for further potential
investigation.
INTERACTIVE LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS 11
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributors
Mik Fanguy is a visiting professor in the English as a Foreign Language Program at the Korea Advanced Institute of
Science and Technology (KAIST) in South Korea. His research interests include online collaborative writing and notetak-
ing and online and blended education.
Matthew Baldwin is a visiting professor in the English as a Foreign Language Program at the Korea Advanced Institute
of Science and Technology (KAIST). He holds an MA in TESOL and a BA in English language and literature. His research
interests include Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), international education, online learning and flipped
class instruction.
Evgeniia Shmeleva is a Ph.D. candidate and a Research Fellow at the Centre of Sociology of Higher Education, Institute
of Education, National Research University Higher School of Economics. Her major research interests lie in the area of
student academic dishonesty, student attrition, online and distance learning, and integration of educational technol-
ogies at the secondary level of education.
Kyungmee Lee is a Lecturer in the Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University, and co-Director of the
Centre for Technology Enhanced Learning. Her research interests include understanding and supporting academic
and social experiences of non-traditional student groups in online higher education, including international students,
adult students, doctoral students, teachers and educational professionals.
Jamie Costley is an assistant professor in the Center for Sociology of Higher Education, Institute of Education at the
Moscow Higher School of Economics. He is interested in a variety of topics related to how to improve learning in
online environments, specifically in the areas of collaborative learning, cognitive load, and instructional design.
ORCID
Mik Fanguy http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9383-1510
Matthew Baldwin http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9863-8544
Evgeniia Shmeleva http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8004-3315
Kyungmee Lee http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9580-9026
Jamie Costley http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1685-3863
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