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Last month, NSTA listserv members shared effective note-taking strategies for science students. This month's column focuses on another useful note-taking strategy: the interactive notebook. An interactive notebook, or INB, is a composition or spiral-bound notebook in which students write, glue, or tape class notes (Figure 1). INBs are used not only as organizational systems for class notes, but also as creative outlets for students as they process the information they learn in class.
When using interactive notebooks, students record information obtained through lectures, videos, readings, and labs on the right side of the notebook; this recorded information is called input (Figure 2). Examples of input include handwritten notes, graphic organizers, and foldables. A foldable is another name for a 3-D graphic organizer. Templates are often printed on brightly colored paper, which students cut and fold into products such as booklets, flip charts, or pop-up diagrams. After constructing the foldable, students complete it by writing down information or drawing illustrations of the vocabulary words or concepts.
On the leftside of the notebook, students interact with the information using various metacognitive strategies such as drawings, diagrams, personal reflections, and summaries; student interaction with the information is called output (Figure 2). When creating output, students are highly encouraged to use color and sketchnoting strategies. Sketchnoting, or visual note-taking, consists of text and drawings, where the visual cues help enhance memory of the information. P.M. from the NSTA Biology e-mail listserv aptly describes the INB format to her students in the following way: "I feed you information on the right side, and you make sense of it on the leftside."
Benefits of interactive notebooks
There are many benefits to using INBs in the science classroom. Research shows that students who write their notes learn and retain more information than those who type their notes (Mueller and Oppenheimer 2014). With INBs and foldables, students are better able to understand concepts, summarize information, and create visual representations of what they learned. In addition, the variety of input and output activities address multiple learning styles and increase student interaction with the information. Lastly, INBs also teach students organization skills and provide them with a one-stop place for their notes.
Resources for interactive notebooks
B.P. from the NSTA Physical Science listserv asked the...