Requirements for electronic note taking systems: A field study of note taking in university classrooms

Abstract

Note taking is the core activity for students in a classroom. There has been a large amount of research conducted, both from industry and from academia, into facilitating the note-taking process. There is evidence that shows that note taking can be beneficial for the students' educational growth. There are also many available systems for taking notes electronically (e.g. Tablet PCs, PDAs). However, what has not been given as much attention is how these electronic devices affect (or support) the note taking task. In this paper, we study university students' current note taking behavior and the changes caused by the use of electronic systems for this activity. The goal of our work is to identify issues that should be considered when evaluating electronic note taking systems and to formulate requirements for future electronic note-taking systems. Our findings show that while the technological support for writing with pens on electronic surfaces is quite advanced, the task of note taking in the classroom is not well supported. We identify the limitations of typical note taking systems and discuss the implications for the design of future note taking systems. Our work consisted of three parts: a survey of current note-taking practices, an observational study in a classroom environment, and a semester long case study of students using electronic note-taking devices. All of these activities took place at a large 4-year university. We found that the people reacted to note-taking devices very differently and that their current practices were not always well supported. The users all wanted to input information as fast as possible, in the manner they wanted but they were not always able to achieve that. Hardware limitations (i.e. screen size, responsiveness) added to this issue. We also found that the features that are well supported in an electronic medium (i.e. modification, reorganizing, multiple pen colors/styles, handwriting recognition, sharing) were not commonly used or wanted.

Technology and note-taking in the classroom, boardroom, hospital room, and courtroom

“…The researchers found that the notes taken with pen and paper and stylus and tablet were substantially alike, and did not differ in quantity, quality, or form. Other researchers reported similar findings regarding the content of stylus/tablet and pen/paper notes, but also noted that students felt that the interface of the tablets and PDAs was not as convenient or comfortable as plain pen and paper [32].…”

Affordances of mobile devices and note-taking apps to support cognitively demanding note-taking

“…In the past decade many researchers advocated the use of computers (Bui et al 2013) and electronic note-taking systems (Ward and Tatsukawa 2003;Kim et al 2009) for recording and summarising important concepts in class. Bui et al (2013) did a study where they compared pen-and-paper note-taking with taking notes on the computer.…”

Note-taking and Handouts in The Digital Age

“…Speed, legibility, and searchability are 3 positive attributes of digital note-taking. 8 Because of these advantages, some students may prefer digital note-taking vs traditional handwritten notes. However, changes wrought from these advances in technology are not all positive.…”

“…3,[5][6][7] Note-taking is a personalized task, and when individual differences with regard to note-taking ability also are considered, interpretation of the literature becomes even more complex. [8][9][10] In addition to these historically studied variables, emerging factors also affect student note-taking. The introduction of tablet computers, note-taking applications (apps), and other education technology in the classroom are altering the way students take notes and consume and process information during class.…”