Teaching Note-taking for Research Assignments: Home

Effective note-taking is a crucial step to quality research. Plagiarism happens or is prevented in the note-taking stage of the research process.

Elements of effective note-taking:

• Employing a strategy
• Reading and thinking before taking notes.
• Creating full bibliographic citations before taking notes
• Paraphrasing at the time of note-taking
• Being able to tie each idea to a source (and page)

The notecard design shared here was inspired and informed by work done by The Thea Holtan Project and NoodleTools. 

Common student errors:

• Going straight from source to draft
• Copying and pasting - "I'll paraphrase later."
  
• Writing down things they don't understand
• Not keeping track of the source

Note-taking skills are transferable, but we need to help our students recognize that there are different strategies for different purposes.

• From a textbook

• From a single source
• From a lecture
• From an interview

• From multiple sources - for research

This presentation was prepared as an introduction for a senior research class.