We explore the effects of taking notes on problem-solving and learning in a scientific discovery domain. Participants solved a series of five scientific reasoning problems in a computer environment in which they had access to an online, unstructured notepad. The results show that participants who used the notepad performed better than those who did not use it. This improvement held even when these participants no longer used the notepad on subsequent tasks. However, not all uses of the notepad were equally effective; only those that involved deeper levels of processing were related to improved performance.

Much of the research on scientific reasoning has investigated the use of explicit, hypothesis-testing strategies. However, there is evidence that scientific reasoning problems can be solved by exploration of the experiment space. This study investigates the strategies by which people explore the experiment space. We examine the relationship between the systematicity of this search and successful performance and find that improved problem-solving may be a function of systematic data collection strategies.