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.