Achieving greater academic success: engaging students by providing feedback and summative grades for note taking

This mixed method research project addressed the question, Will the awarding of grades for note taking increase the average final grades of students enrolled in a first semester college English course? Four sections of the same EN1201, English Composition course, participated in this research project. Two sections of four were required to take daily class notes in Learning Journals, which were graded at mid-semester and at end of the semester and earned students up to ten percent of their final grade. The other two sections were able to earn up to ten percent of their final grade for writing two 300-word Learning Summaries of the course content that were graded at mid-semester and also at the end of the semester. The average final grades of the two groups were compared. In addition, qualitative research methods were used to record the responses by the two groups on a pretest and post-test Student Learning Survey. The students who kept daily Learning Journals were expected to achieve a higher average final grades [sic] than students who wrote Learning Summaries. However, because of the number of uncontrolled variables in this research project, final grade differences between these two groups were not statistically significant. The data from this research failed to reject the null hypothesis which stated that there was no correlation between daily note taking and higher final grades. Therefore, more research with greater control of the variables is recommended. --P.i.