Effectiveness of Digital Note-Taking on Students’ Performance in Declarative, Procedural and Conditional Knowledge Learning

Abstract

Note-taking is an ever-present learning activity in students’ daily lives, and an increasing number of mobile terminals have been integrated into curricu-lums. However, the effectiveness of the use of digital note-taking on mobile terminals on students’ learning has not been deeply explored. The purpose of this study is to evaluate how digital note-taking using mobile terminals af-fects student performance, with particular regard to declarative, procedural and conditional knowledge learning. A quasi-experiment was conducted for three months among 72 first-year high school students from a computer sci-ence (CS) course. In the study, students in the experimental group (n = 40) recorded notes digitally, whereas the students in the control group (n = 32) used the conventional approach (i.e., recording handwritten notes). The re-sults indicate that the students who recorded notes digitally scored signifi-cantly higher than those who recorded notes conventionally. The students who were designated as “excellent,” and those who were designated as “low-performing,” were most likely to benefit from this new method of note-taking.