Simple Measures to Encourage More Note-Taking in the Era of Electronic Notebooks and Their Evaluations

It is important to have students take notes so as to increase their concentration. We examined how students take notes by providing paper notebooks and PC notebooks, each of which are provided with a fill-in-blanks section and a free writing section. The results show that, 93.9% of the fill-in-blanks areas of paper and PC notebooks were written, while only 14.0% of the free writing areas were. In test results, questions related to the “fill-in-blanks” area resulted in significantly higher scores than those related to the free-writing area. Further, comparisons between the paper and PC notebook users showed that the PC notebook users earned higher scores on the questions related to free-writing section.