Is there evidence that suggests students should take notes? I hear a lot about good note-taking strategies vs bad note-taking strategies, and I have seen a lot of research papers on different styles of note-taking. What I haven't seen though is any study that has asked if we should even be taking notes in the first place.

Specifically I would like to know the long-term effects of taking notes vs not taking notes. It is clear to me that if someone has taken notes their entire academic career, then immediately stops, their performance will probably plummet, but how do students who have never taken notes compare to students who have always taken notes?

I would guess certain learning styles would benefit from note-taking while other learning styles are hindered by note-taking, but I would like to see some actual data on this if anyone knows anything about it. A cursory Google search didn't return anything, so I hope there is someone on here that may be able to shed some light on this.

Edit: A lot of people have taken this question to solely be asking for research on this topic. While I would most like to see actual data, I did not intend this to solely be a literature search, and people can post their anecdotal evidence, as long as it is pointed at the long-term difference in note-taking vs not taking notes.
You said you're not looking for research on note-taking, so consider this a freebie.

That said, I'm not entirely sure what you are looking for here. There's a preponderance of research showing that (1) putting things in your own words and (2) recall exercises over time significantly improve memory. This pdf has some good overviews, and points to this academic publication (note: paywall) which contains a bunch of actual references.

Actually, the more I'm researching here, there does seem to be significant evidence that the act of note-taking itself is beneficial to recall and understanding. Two more recent examples relate to mock jurors watching a mock trial while either taking notes or not [1][2]. There's a paper which I can't seem to download but I've seen cited a few times that discusses the positive effect of note taking on student performance [3].

All this said, there's more to it than this. There are numerous note-taking methods, and they have a literature all of their own (e.g., [4]). The way you take notes definitely affects how effective the note-taking will be.

So yeah, it helps.



Edit based on comments: There is substantial evidence that note-taking, by itself, improves retention. That said, the OP seems to be curious whether the fact that we take notes at all is biasing our results; perhaps we should be focusing on comparing pure memory recall techniques to note-taking. Said differently, will someone with memory training outperform someone proficient at note-taking?

I still think that this question itself has issues. Specifically:


There is a significant difference between someone who simply doesn't take notes and someone who has trained themselves to not need written notes. I know people who avoid writing anything (mostly psychiatrists who don't want everything written down and subpoena-able), and it took years of mental training to get there. That is different from the lazy kid who just says "I can remember everything."
As with note-taking, there are many different techniques for remembering without notes, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. I think that ignoring the techniques ignores an important part of the question.
I don't think this question is even answerable anymore. Most of the modern world takes notes in some form (source: I made this up), whereas a very minor percentage of people nowadays use purely memory-based techniques (source: I made this up too). As such, finding a representative sample from the second group for our comparison would be pretty doggone difficult.