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 curriculums. 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 affects 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 science (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 results indicate that the students who recorded notes digitally scored significantly 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.