My example of Q Notes taken from a screen shot of my Interwrite Workspace.

In an effort to try something new in our history class, today I will be introducing Q-notes to my students. Q-notes is a two column note taking system that is very easy to use and helps simplify the note taking process. In the left hand column students are asked to record their cues or questions…basically they will be taking headings or subheadings from their books and forming questions from those headings and placing them in this column. In the right hand column students will record their description or answer that matches their cue.

Today we used the section of our book that deals with McCarthyism and politics of Arkansas post WWII…and of course, as with any new technique I introduce to my students, I wanted to gain some feed back from them as to how useful this note taking style was.

The vertical axis represents how much my students enjoyed this style and the horizontal axis represents how much they learned using this style. Students were asked to mark where they fell on the chart as they left the classroom. As you can see there was mixed results from this experiment that I used today…while many students seemed to enjoy this method of notes, there were those that didn’t care for the style of notes. Tomorrow in class we will take some time to discuss what the positives and negatives were of this style.

Mr. McClung