Recent advances in technology have made it easy to provide students an outline or some form of notes prior to lectures and for later review. To test the efficacy of instructor-provided notes, 74 students studied lecture material under one of four conditions, in groups of 4 or 5 students. Some listened and took notes as their normal strategy. Others listened and took notes using an instructor-provided outline with spaces for students to fill in important information. A third group listened with a complete set of notes that included virtually everything the instructor would say, in outline form. A control group studied the complete set of instructor notes without hearing the lecture, which was a 35-minute lecture on the structure and functions of the brain. Experiment 1 tested memory, while the second experiment measured memory and transfer. In both studies, the group taking their own notes and the group with instructor-provided partial notes performed better than the groups with full sets of notes, regardless of whether they heard the lecture or not. While instructor-provided notes have been shown previously to facilitate learning, the straight-forward nature of this lecture and extensive use of Power Point may make providing notes unnecessary. (Contains 1 table and 14 references.) (Author/SLD)