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

the inappropriate use of handouts and notes is a common academic problem among students. Student's 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 student's attitude toward reading handouts and notes instead of references. 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 p<0.05 were used in analyzing the data. 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 student's tendency to use notes instead of references. 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.