Students' Attitude towards Note-taking and Reading Pamphlets/handouts in Courses

Background: the inappropriate use of handouts and notes is a common academic problem among students. Students' notes are too brief and incomplete in compare with references; hence they may not cover the required content for the courses. The aim of this paper is to analyze students' attitude toward reading handouts and notes instead of references. Methods: In this analytical and descriptive study a representative sample of 201participants, including medical, paramedical, nursing and midwifery students of Golestan University of Medical Sciences, has been drawn. The data derived from this research has been collected by a valid and reliable questionnaire. There have been 39 questions in the questionnaire ranging from 1 to 5, based on Likert scale; five represents that students are proponent of reading notes. The sum of scores was 20; the 16th version of SPSS, T-test, one-way and two-way variance analysis at significance level pFindings: 66.7% of participants were female. ANOVA test showed that there were significant differences among the mean of attitudes of medical students (18.15±1.37), nursing (17.15±1.46), and paramedical (17.67±1.35) (P=0.008).  The overall results revealed that the huge amount of content of references is the main factor for students' tendency to use notes instead of references. Conclusion: the final result was that students have got positive attitude to note-taking during courses and use their notes as their direct reference material, while the class notes are not reasonably efficient, particularly when used as the main learning strategy.