Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.