How Should Middle-School Students with LD Approach Online Note Taking? A Mixed-Methods Study

This explanatory sequential mixed-methods study explored how the encoding of text ideas is affected when students with learning disabilities (LD) take notes from Web-based text. In the quantitative phase of the study, 15 students took three kinds of notes - typed, copy and paste, and written - with each kind of notes addressing a different topic. After taking notes, students performed poorly on two immediate measures of facts learning. Cued-recall test performances were best for topics noted by writing, whereas multiple-choice test performances were best for topics noted by copying and pasting. Students performed worse on the cued-recall test when it was readministered four days later. In the qualitative phase of the study, followup interviews indicated students preferred copying and pasting their notes (for practical reasons) and found typing notes to be distracting, which made learning problematic. A textual analysis of students' notes confirmed that students took mostly verbatim notes when typing or writing, which has been linked to shallow processing, and perhaps further accounts for the low level of learning that occurred. The mixing of quantitative and qualitative data (in the qualitative data analysis phase of the study), along with learning and motivation theories, provides justification for teachers to instruct middle-school students with LD to use copy and paste to take notes from Web-based sources.