Students face various learning challenges in their daily life. Teachers should teach them learning strategies to accommodate demands. One hundred ten fifth graders were randomly assigned to three groups: strategic notetaking, partial strategic notetaking, and control group, with three levels (high versus medium versus low) according to their prior science achievement. The levels also functioned as one independent variable in the MANCOVA analysis, with writing speed as covariate. The results showed significant treatment main effects in support of strategic and partial strategic groups on the measurements of board cued, verbal cued, and noncued information units. The high science achievement group outperformed the low one on the task of verbal cued, whereas the medium outperformed the low one on comprehension multiple-choice test. The study suggested notetaking as an effective learning strategy that can be taught to elementary students. 1. Notetaking Instruction Enhances Students’ Science Learning Knowledge, rather than manufactured product, has become the central economic commodity of our modern society [1]. And as noted over two decades earlier, “He who has access to knowledge has the power” (see [2, page 20]) and has the best chance to be successful [3]. Studies have shown that learners’ limited knowledge of study skills is a major reason that encounters academic difficulty during secondary-level schooling or in college [4, 5]. In response to this situation, educators often recommend strategies instruction as a mean of enhancing the learning outcomes for children [6]. Moreover, the demands of knowledge transfer to novel contexts likewise recommend strategies instruction as a way to help students address future learning needs [7]. Many studies concerned with strategies instruction suggest that students should be taught that study skills produce positive effects on learning [8, 9], should be taught early enough [10], and strategies such as summarizing and identifying main ideas from text and discourse are believed to be utmost important [11]. 1.1. Notetaking Strategies Much evidence indicates that teaching notetaking is an effective strategy to improve students’ learning (e.g., [12–15]). Findings from this research indicate that frequency and quality of notetaking are positively correlated with students’ academic performance [16–19]. Notetaking may help students by “attending to the lecture, locating targets in long-term memory, holding and manipulating the attended information in working memory, encoding ideas into long-term memory, and transcribing
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