Dr. Terrell Hooper
Assistant Professor of Music
American University of Sharjah
Email | thooper@aus.edu

Background/Motivation:

I teach an Elements of Music course for music minors and a general populous of engineering, business and architecture students needing to earn a general arts credit. I have experienced many challenges in teaching such a course in the Middle East where students have never been exposed to any elements of western music or history. The course surveys the entire gamut of western music and history, while simultaneously giving a foundational understanding of music literacy. Given the vast parameters of the course, students are expected to have strong independent study skills. While study habits are primarily individual and differ with each student, I found students not prepared or equipped with basic study skills required to be successful in the course. The most basic skill that was lacking was the ability to take notes or organize the material being discussed in class. In addition, student feedback on end of course evaluations revealed that information and material discussed in class was so unfamiliar and vast that students did not know how to organize or digest the information. From the gathered data, I inferred that students needed a note-taking model, an opportunity to take notes on their own volition, and a moment to reflect on their note taking abilities. By implementing the aforementioned objectives, I wanted to observe whether or not said objectives would encourage students to think in a metacognitive manner and would perhaps be awakened to the importance of metacognitive practices regarding their own study habits.

Method:

Due to the pedagogical “bumps” that I experienced in my first semester of teaching Elements of Music, I decided to create a sequential curriculum (see Figure 1) that would provide students with guided lecture notes[1]. The purpose of these notes were two-fold: 1) help students structure information being discussed during class 2) help students remember, reflect, and re-organize course content during independent study. The sequential curriculum was in line with the syllabus and students were not educated about note taking skills, but were merely provided with guided lecture notes that I prepared prior to each class meeting.

Three guided lecture notes were given over a three-week period (see Appendix A). Each week the guided lecture notes were designed to incorporate a progressive guide for helping students become more metacognitive aware of proper note taking habits during in-class lectures. The first guided lecture notes were designed to orient students to the process of taking notes in an outline format and contained fill in the blank areas that were curated throughout the outline. Subsequent guided lecture notes included reflective questions at the end of the lecture. Lecture 2 contained recall questions and Lecture 3 contained essay questions concerning content that was discussed during the lecture. All three guided lecture notes were collected after each class and data recorded on how many students completed the entire handout and rated on its overall completion (i.e number of blanks left on the handout). Lecture 4 (the Classical Lecture) did not use guided lecture notes and no instruction or requirements for note taking was given to students because I wanted to observe how many students saw the need to take notes of their own volition.

Following the review session (see Figure 1) a midterm exam was administered. The midterm exam consisted of multiple choice, fill in the blank, and true or false questions and were copied verbatim from the previous semester exam so data could be compared with how students not exposed to guided lecture notes scored on the same questions. After the midterm exam, students were given a survey via Google Forms and were asked questions regarding the usefulness of the guided lecture notes. Finally, I gave a ten-minute lecture that informed students on the data gathered in the questionnaire, statistics on how many students completed each handout during each lecture, and the exam scores from students who used guided lecture notes with students who did not use guided lecture notes in the Fall semester.

Figure 1. Sequential Curriculum for Guided Lecture Notes

                        Data Outcomes:

All students enrolled in Elements of Music for Spring semester participated in the study (n=29), however, due to random class absences, Lecture 1 had 27 participants, Lecture 2 had 28 participants and Lecture 3 had 25 participants. A set of 30 questions derived directly from the lecture notes were used on the midterm exam for students in Spring semester (n=29) and the final exam for students from Fall semester (n=28). Each exam question (n=30) was scored as correct or incorrect on both Fall and Spring student exams and the total number of incorrect answers was calculated for each student. An independent t-test revealed no significant difference between groups, t(53)=1.02, p=.31; Mean (Std Dev) Fall Semester = 4.9 (3.4) and Mean (Std Dev) Spring Semester = 4.0 (2.9).

On a more positive note regarding the incorporation of the guided lecture notes, students who participated in the questionnaire (n=23) gave strongly positive ratings for the notes. They rated their overall satisfaction on a 3-point Likert scale choosing between unsatisfactory, satisfactory continuum and extremely satisfactory. Results indicated 69.6% (n=15) of students surveyed were extremely satisfied with using guided lecture notes and 30.4% (n=7) of students chose the middle option, indicating neither unsatisfied nor extremely satisfied. Open-ended student feedback on using teacher guided lecture notes is represented in Table 1.

Table 1.Student Feedback Using Guided Lecture Notes

 Observations:

The primary purpose of this research study was to 1) help students structure information being discussed during class 2) help students remember, reflect, and re-organize course content during independent study. The study illuminated the fact that when students organize, reflect, and collaborate with their teachers on their own learning it improves the pedagogical process. Although the data does not necessarily confirm that guided lecture notes improves test scores, it would be remiss to not acknowledge that students do enjoy being provided with a structure for organizing the information presented during lectures. In addition, no negative feedback concerning the amount of material or organizational components of the course were received on end-of-course student evaluations.

The intent of helping students take personal initiative on using guided lecture notes in Lecture 4 (see Figure 1) and giving an informative ten-minute lecture on the possible gains of using such an organizational scheme when listening to class lectures was to help students to think more about their own study skills. However, generally speaking, I did not observe a change in the majority of classroom behavior with students beginning to practice metacognition regarding their own study habits. I actually observed students wanting or expecting the guided lecture notes for every class. The end-of-course student evaluations even noted that students wanted guided lecture notes for each class lecture. Even though students positively reflected on the usefulness of the guided lecture notes, I observed a disconnect in motivating students to take personal initiative for their personal study habits. Future research should investigate the link between in-class lectures and how students become more self-directed within their own independent study habits.

[1] Guided notes are defined as “teacher-prepared handouts that ‘guide’ a student through a lecture with standard cues and prepared space in which to write the key facts, concepts, and/or relationships” (Heward, 1994, p. 304).