EXPLORING THE DYNAMIC INTERPLAY BETWEEN NOTE-TAKING STRATEGIES AND READING COMPREHENSION PERFORMANCE OF MOROCCAN EFL STUDENTS: A QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

Article History Received: 7 August 2020 Revised: 9 September 2020 Accepted: 23 September 2020 Published: 5 October 2020


INTRODUCTION
Much of the research in reading sees it as a self-discovery process which is an experiential exploration and integration of various chosen processing models or bits of them for the sake of making most of the reading text.
The inference of meaning is the ultimate purpose of the reader who deconstructs the text, to borrow (Derrida, 1988) word, to actively understand the gist as well as the details. The interactive nature of reading is reflected by Block (1992) who asserts that the metacognition plays a huge role in paving readers' way towards potential full understanding of what a text communicates especially in L1 and L2 cases. Additionally, Baier (2005) after having pre-tested and post-tested fourteen sixth-grade students found out that twelve of the fourteen sixth grade students demonstrated improvement in the reading comprehension scores. Two of the fourteen students resulted in no change in the reading comprehension scores. There were no students that exhibited a decline in scores. Overall, it was concluded that the sixth-grade literature students performed better on the posttests where they used the Self-Questioning Reading Strategy.
It was hypothesized that comprehension and retaining of more information from a reading text relates to the use of good reading comprehension strategies and skills (Carrier, 1983). But what has been overlooked is the fact that other literacies, such as note-taking behavior is proven to be determinant in the success of a student for academic as well other versatile exploits (Woolley, 2011).
The thrust of this study is driven by the study conducted by Creative_ADMIN (2018) which states that: In Morocco, international reading tests have shown consistently low reading performance among middle school students. Morocco's national assessment revealed that only 25 percent of eighth grade students were able to distinguish the main idea of a basic text, and only 4 percent could summarize its content.
A challenge for this study to surmount is to expand the above-mentioned research findings to the tertiary level and put this claim into test.

Statement of the Problem
Given such a truth about the rate and quality of reading in Morocco at the high school level, the present study investigates the tertiary level and seeks answers to how higher education students manage to get good reading performance especially that they are instructed in how to read in different modules along with enhancing critical soft skills such as taking notes. However, worth noting here is that there is little information available to suggest how confident Moroccan higher education EFL students perceive of the type of systems they use while taking notes and how much effective they are in comprehending a text. Because it is taken for granted that taking notes is helpful in understanding course content effectively, little empirical evidence is advanced exclusively in a context like the Moroccan. It follows therefore that a study, such as this one, investigating note-taking strategies and their effect on how effective they are in enabling students to understand and reconstruct original reading material for later use, recall, and review in a lecture teaching model that is characteristic of the Moroccan higher education, is worth exploring.

Note-taking Concept and Strategies
Undoubtedly, note-taking is one of the most used strategies of encoding meaning through recording chunks of text for diverse learning reasons even though students are not formally introduced to it Boyle (2012). It is in effect a rudimentary "skill of life" [italics in original] that is essential in education". With education having the meaning of mastering knowledge of facts relationships with understanding, note-taking proves its relevance to the learning enterprise. Every student takes notes and the relevance and utility of what is taken is debatable in the sense that it might or might not help in reconstructing original material.
McPherson (2018) defines note-taking as "a strategy for making information meaningful" (p. 6). Making sense of the material listened to or read depends so much on how it is processed by the brain. That is, note-taking here is the result of a complex effective skill of reconstructing, tailoring and storing in an operative way the material for later diverse reasons and purposes. Verbatim notes are of little value unless they are reorganized and made sense of (Greenlaw, 2012). Stroud (2013) for their part define note-taking strategies as text marking strategies that "are specific learning strategies associated with good listening skills and the ability to discern important versus non-important information" (Saklofske, Schwean, Reynolds, & Nathan, 2013). Note-taking strategies are higher order skills that enable the student to manipulate and reconstruct material listened to or read in the most effective encoding way that leads to efficient learning and academic achievement.
Note-taking is also seen by Page (2007) as a system used to "summarize and to record the information that is extracted during the research stage" (p. 35). This highlights the utility of using note-taking in listening for procedures analyst so that detraction from listening should be minimized and information that is kept in a parsimonious manner would be major in encoding meaning later. Note-taking is not to be seen as an end in itself as to appear in the form of another book but a minimalist helper to enhance memory remembrance and later use.
Moreover, stressing the research role of note-taking, Clark (2007) believes that it provides a structure for students to organize their information while reading and reviewing different research sources for overarching ideas, otherwise the material noted would be only "a laundry list of random information" (p. 98).
Being a good listener or reader does not necessarily mean that one is a good note-taker. Taking-notes in class "is actually a very complicated process; there is much more to it than jotting down a grocery list so you won't forget something" (Staley, 2018). Doing well on tests is not haphazard, but it depends on taking effective and useful notes that help make sense of what has been collected as bits of knowledge.
Many are the reasons behind people using note-taking as a strategy of learning. Students take notes to "plan future events and activities, to study for examinations, to prepare a technical talk and to record the minutes of work meeting" (Karimi, 2011). Nevertheless, the theoretical and practical motives behind the adoption of such a study skill diverge from one individual student to another. The purposes encompass the reconstruction of original material for later use as an external memory, for subsequent mechanism for reviewing, and for consequent recall as a preparation for exams in which note-taking skill becomes note-making strategy (Race, 2014).
Though "research indicates that students are generally incomplete notetakers recording a relatively small percentage of critical lecture ideas" (Cyrs, 1994) note-taking is recognized in the literature as a strong critical activity that stimulates later recall and effective reflection. In this vein, Castello and Monereo (2005 as cited in Karimi (2011)) consider note-taking as having a hegemonic power that facilitates the teacher-learner interaction at the university. The notes taken are used as defense mechanisms for students to defend themselves in interaction that is lacking under the influence of lecture method at the university and a as a proof that they retained some of the material exposed and are able to reconstruct and even deconstruct knowledge amassed effectively during the lecture. achievement (Haghverdi, Biria, & Karimi, 2010). Students engaged with unfamiliar texts for a deep encoding of the meaning are furnished with means to extract it easily. Note-taking in this sense implies the encoding of either a written or an oral text by jotting down what is supposed to be relevant information for later purposes. Piolat, Olive, and Kellogg (2005) consider note-taking as "a complex activity that requires comprehension and selection of information and written production processes" (p. 292).

Reading Comprehension
Reading is usually seen as a complex cognitive process of encoding meaning that is developed over time. The act or "reading" presupposes that the student has the ability to decode the text by getting at the sounds and sentences structure and later attack word meaning. This implies therefore the ability to interpret the linguistic elements and pave the way towards comprehension. The reading comprehension formula of Gough and Tunmer (1986) is suggestive in this regard and which stipulates that reading equals the product of decoding and Despite the seemingly easy definition of reading as a skill, it seems that the process as mentioned earlier is a multifaceted one. The process starts with the decoding stage where the reader is to decipher the phonological as well as the syntactic properties of the word and later proceeds with the mental representations of word semanticity.
Subsequently, the reader engages with the cognitive analysis of decrypting the meaning associations between units of meaning. Later, the reader shakes his or her schemata/priming to ultimately generate inferences about the relevant material needed for comprehension.
Reading is an extraordinary achievement when the reader is able to move smoothly through the abovementioned phases. Graesser (2012in McNamara (2010) testifies that: "The coding, interpretation, and construction of all of these levels are effortlessly achieved at a rate of 250 to 400 words per minute by a proficient adult reader" (p. 4). Comprehension follows to need more effort and the pace might be halted sometimes. Novice readers suffer the hard time given by lack of reading strategies which slow down the process of comprehension. Thus, cognitive strategies are urgently needed when the reader gets stuck at any level of comprehension as a "successful reader implements deliberate, conscious, effortful, time-consuming strategies to repair or circumvent a reading component that is not intact" (Graesser, 2012). These strategies coupled with more knowledge of language, text structure, and the priming the reader makes use of a top-down model comprehension is primordial in processing a text (Duke, theoretically to the five systems of note taking and later practice the techniques where they were left to their means to continue with the task and get evaluated on how much they recall through writing. After the treatment phase is done with, both groups are assessed on the effect of the treatment (note taking strategies) on the reading comprehension performance as students are post-tested using a TOEFL iBT Reading Practice text the notes of which they could review and exploit depending on the type of note-taking strategy they opted for. At the end of the testing sessions, students are to hand in their notes for later washback effect objective.

FINDINGS AND DATA ANALYSIS
The data collected were fed into the SPSS version 22 to help test the hypothesis and answer the research question of the study. The obtained data were therefore analyzed by calculating the independent samples t-test to determine if there is any significant difference between the means of two groups, the experimental and the control, on the effect of practicing the type of note-taking strategy chosen on reading comprehension ability of the two groups. The researcher coded the data in the first stage, and later proceeded with the analysis of the data with the appropriate statistical tools to ascertain whether the two groups significantly differ in their reading performance after having instructed the experimental group into the note-taking systems.

Descriptive Statistics Analysis of the Data
The purpose of this section is to present the analysis of the data. This study takes two groups to assess for the effect of a treatment (note taking strategies) on the independent variable (reading comprehension performance).
The study included 94 freshmen, who were enrolled and placed in Semester One classes during the fall semester and who were present on the dates the data collection instruments were administered.  Table 1 above gives the descriptive statistics for each of the two groups, the control and the experimental. In this example, there are (N=47) students in the Experimental group with a mean score of (M=11.06) which is visibly higher than that of the (N=47) students in the Control group with a mean score of (M=4.340). Additionally, we can discern from the standard deviations that the variation in the data (i.e. spread of scores) is (SD=3.422) and (SD=3.52) for the experimental ad control groups respectively, and it shows that they are very close. That is, the small spread of each observed data around the mean for both groups is close to the mean, resulting in a small variance and standard deviation. This also attests to the homogeneity of the sample chosen for the present study, and by extension, the sample data are also said to be homogeneous.
The last column exposes the standard error of the mean for each of the two groups. The question is whether the difference between the two means is statistically significant so that we can be confident that it's not due to a random error. This is where the table of inferential statistics or the results of the independent samples t-test is helpful.

Inferential Statistics Analysis of the Data
The second part of the output provides the inferential statistics as shown in Table 2. A first look at the equality of variance test or Levene's test shows that the assumption of equal group variances is met. If the significance were smaller than 0.05, which is not the case here as it is .653, we would have to conclude that the variances are equal.
However, we have a significance level of .653 that indicates that the variances are statistically equal. The "Sig. (two tailed)" column indicates a significance level of .000. Therefore, this finding shows that it is well into the 0.05 exclusion area of a two-tailed test and the T ratio would result in a rejection of the null hypothesis. This is a finding so extreme that it could not be considered a chance finding. The interpretation references of the group means shown in the top panel demonstrate clearly that the groups are statistically different from one another with the control group demonstrating lower scores (M =4.34) compared to the experimental group (M =11.06) (Abbott, 2017). The Levene's test checks the null hypothesis that the variances of the two groups are equal. The assumption of approximately equal variances is not violated as the p-value is 0.653; therefore, in the top row of the output table, values are the relevant ones for our subsequent analysis. The value of the t statistic is 9.386, and the p-value displayed is 0.000 (less than the threshold alpha 0.005). This means that there is a very small probability of this result occurring by chance under the null hypothesis of no difference between the two groups.
The p-value is 0.000 and, therefore, the difference between the two means (M=11.06, SD=3.42; M=4.340, SD=3.52) is statistically and significantly different from zero at the 5% level of significance. It could be concluded then that there is sufficient evidence (the p-value is lower than 0.05) to suggest that note-taking instruction does change the mean of reading performance.
The assumptions of the Independent Samples t-test seem to be met as for the Independent observations, in our case, there are two cases representing two groups of semester-one students. Concerning Normality, it follows that when talking about normality distribution, the dependent variable must follow a normal distribution in the population. Thus, since our sample is way beyond 25 units (94 units), then we won't bother about normality distribution. As for Homogeneity, the standard deviation of our dependent variable are almost identical in both groups (SD=3.52; SD=3.42). We only need this assumption if our sample sizes are (sharply) unequal. Therefore, it seems that these assumptions are not badly violated; otherwise we would have been in need to run a Mann-Whitney test instead of a t-test.

DISCUSSION
The findings of the study revealed that the Independent Samples t-test is significant [t(94)=9.386, p=.000] as the p-value is lower than the theoretical significance level (p=.05). This suggests that the null hypothesis is to be rejected and the alternative hypothesis that states that there is a significant link between instructing students on the systems of note-taking and the comprehension of the written materials is retained and confirmed.
The differences are statistically significant between the control group means and the experiment group means on reading performance. That is, there are significant differences between the two groups on their reading performance within the samples chosen as the experimental groups' performance is better than that of the control given the effect of the treatment the first group has been exposed to. The individuals within the experimental group have proven the utility and salience of note-taking skill possession if any reading performance is to be successful.
The only research question advanced in this study and that enquires about whether the two groups significantly differ in their reading performance after having been instructed one group, the experimental, into the The results demonstrated therefore that there is a significant link between instructing students on the systems of note-taking and the comprehension of the written materials as well as a huge difference between the treatment and the control groups. These conclusions obtained are consistent with some previous studies such as Clark (2007); Haghverdi et al. (2010); Karimi (2011); Staley (2018) which stress the fact that students versed in note-taking manipulation while reading material acquire consistent and organized means of information storage and usage, and avoid hence the "laundry list of random information" that some would collect without such knowledge (Clark, 2007).
The results of this study on the other hand run counter to what Kiewra (1987) preached. For him, students are generally incompetent note takers who are unable to critically record ideas. This adds to the idea that note-taking as a skill is seen, by this scholar and others, as a complicated critical study skill that is far from being teachable.

CONCLUSION
The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effect of note-taking as a treatment on the students' reading performance. The results of the data analysis revealed that the students (experimental group) performed significantly well on the reading text after having used some of the note taking notes systems they were instructed into. That is, both the product and process effects of note-taking instruction were confirmed. The findings provide evidence of the importance of note taking systems in good reading comprehension performance. They also corroborate previous findings that training in taking notes improves reading comprehension performance (Nwokoreze, 1990;Slotte & Lonka, 1999 (2011)) however, conventional notes lead to a poor test performance (Song, 2018;Zuckerman, 2016).
It was found that there is a significant link between instructing students on the systems of note-taking and the comprehension of the written materials confirming therefore the advanced hypothesis. Following the same line of reasoning, having the Experimental Group (M=11.06, SD=3.42) performing expressively better than the Control Group (M=4.340, SD=3.52) shows evidently the significant difference in their reading performance. It can be concluded therefore that note-taking training, particularly with the effective use of particular systems, is conducive to successful learning (Pilcher & Miller, 2000cited in Lee (2005).
In details, the results of data analysis revealed that students who completed and studied the five note taking strategies performed substantially better on comprehension, recall and retention of information, despite the probable brevity of the training period, than did the control group students who conventionally heavily made use of their reading comprehension test notes.
Backing up therefore the quantitative results obtained via the statistical tool utilized, the independent samples t-test, the qualitative data gathered from students about the way they used their notes suggested the substantial dependence on a sole note-taking strategy, Cornell. This reliance is probably due to the simple concept of the system as it focuses on two main sections, the cue and summary sections. The cue section enables students to record notes for later review and recall and they can use it for vocabulary words and study questions. For the summary section that constitutes the lower segment of the sheet, it is exploited for summary writing and highlighting major information. This raises another venue of research as the researcher could have controlled for the note taking