Student note writing: Practices, purposes, identifications

This chapter analyses student notes as a dialogue in the Bakhtinian sense. In the sociocultural tradition, note writing, like any writing, is seen as a social act that holds a cultural and an individual meaning. There is a large psychological-cognitive and a somewhat smaller social and sociocultural research literature on student notes. The chapter focuses on a dialogical view on note writing, and explores the meanings of note writing from a student perspective. It addresses the following question: what is student note writing an answer to? The chapter presents the case study of three students: Sofia, Michael, and, to a lesser extent, Rasmus. All three students were participants in the longitudinal writing research project Writing to Learn, Learning to Write (WLLW) which follows students from year nine to year twelve. Sofia regularly writes notes as part of her homework, a practice that was not used as consequently by other students in the WLLW project.