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We examined longhand note taking strategies when reading and summarizing a source text that was formatted with bullets or that was presented in a single paragraph. We analyzed cognitive effort when reading the source text, when jotting notes, when reading the notes, and when composing the summary, as well as time spent in these activities and the content of the notes and the summaries. With a formatted text, students' perceived comprehension difficulty was lower and they expended less cognitive effort, spent less time reading the text, and noted more ideas. While composing the summary, only those students who read the formatted source text continued selecting ideas in their notes. Finally, the summaries were unaffected by the formatting of the source text. The study shows that formatting a source text with bullets facilitates note taking by helping students to grasp its structure and by reducing the cognitive effort of reading.

This study concerns the cognitive effort expended and the difficulties experienced by undergraduate students as they took notes and wrote a text based on a lecture given in French, their primary language (L1), and in English (L2). The 21 participants had studied English (L2) for 7 years before attending the university and they had taken 3 years of intensive courses at the university in order to obtain their first diploma in English (“license”). Participants were first trained on a secondary task that allowed us to measure their cognitive effort while they performed two other main tasks in both languages, namely (1) listening and taking notes on the main ideas of the lecture, and (2) writing a text based on their notes. Participants also answered a questionnaire about their difficulties with comprehension, taking notes, making use of their notes, and writing in both languages. The results indicated that writing processes were more effortful than notetaking. Students’ performance on the writing task did not vary across languages. In contrast, the cognitive effort associated with taking notes was greater for L2 than for L1, and writing speed was slower. More difficulty was also experienced for notetaking, especially in L2, than in writing.