Impact of Note Taking in Higher Education: A Case Study of Bilingual Students of Saudi Arabia

Abstract

The main focus of the present study is to address the impact of note taking in higher education on the academic success of the bilingual students whose native language is not English. Although note-taking is frequently described as an important skill for university student success, there have been very few note taking research involving bilingual students in the Middle East. The main concern of the authors is to probe the relationship between note-taking strategy and students' listening comprehension (LC) ability especially in student centered approaches that provide learner with the best and efficient way of learning while in the classroom and after they graduate.  To conduct the study (N=66) undergraduate students of communications skills from different disciplines e.g. Business, Law, Computer, Architecture and Humanities from Prince Sultan University, Saudi Arabia were selected for the experiment. They were then randomly divided into groups: instructed note-takers, and non note-takers, to investigate the impact of guided/ instructed note taking skill on the improvement of student’s comprehension, critical thinking, retention and recall.  The results in the present study showed that learning and applying note taking techniques improved comprehension of the content as well as the test scores of the students in exam.