University Honors

While many students take photos of lecture slides during class, research has revealed that doingso may impair memory for photographed content compared to unphotographed content.However, little is known about how taking both photos and notes simultaneously affects learningfrom a lecture. Early work on this topic from our lab has found a significant note-taking benefitbut also a significant photo-taking impairment when students engage in these behaviors in an in-person class setting. The present study sought to replicate these findings in an online setting. Inaddition, the present study sought to evaluate the relationship between quality of the notes andlearning from the lecture. Specifically, we: 1) compared the difference in the number of correctanswers found in the notes when taking both photos and notes compared to only taking notes,and 2) correlated the proportion of answers found in the notes with memory performance.Additionally, we used a cross-experiment comparison to examine these effects in in-person vs.online settings. The findings indicate that participants had better note quality when they onlytook notes compared to when they took photos and notes together; however, this difference onlyemerged in-person. In both in-person and online environments, note quality was significantlyrelated to memory performance such that having more answers in the notes was related to highertest scores on the lecture content. Together, our results suggest that the nature of the relationshipbetween photo- and note-taking and learning may differ across instructional modality.