Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study aimed to test the benefit of note-taking on pauses and learning in online educational videos. Participants (N = 72) were randomly assigned to one of two note-taking conditions (allowed or not) with the possibility to take pauses during a 10-minute online instructional video on the autonomic nervous system. The results did not reveal a significant correlation between note-taking and the number of pauses. Moreover, we observed no significant effect of note-taking on learning performance. However, prior knowledge and age affected significantly the relationship between pauses, note-taking and learning performance. We discuss the importance of prior knowledge and age for future research.