Recent educational research and scholarship calls note taking one of the research based strategies that help improve student achievement. I reviewed some of the literature on note taking and found that researchers agree that note taking is useful. I found descriptions of several different methods of note taking, and I wanted to investigate the relative usefulness of some of the methods. After studying some literature about two different styles, the Cornell note taking system and guided notes, I taught these methods to two different classes. I then gave both students the same test over the same content and found that students’ performances differed depending upon which note taking method they used.