Original Articles
The effects of different memo-taking methods on the contents of discussion reports:
Text mining based qualitative analysis of visual information tools
2010 Volume 53 Issue 3 Pages 60-71
Details
2010 Volume 53 Issue 3 Pages 60-71
The purpose of this study is to examine memos and reports of discussions. While the term“discussion”may be defined as something mediated through voice between multiple individuals engaged in collaborative thinking, it is difficult for humans to listen to and accurately comprehend a discussion because speech (auditory information)fades immediately. Accordingly,we must employ not only auditory information but also visual information when teaching about discussion. Visual information tools that are used to support discussion are referred to as“visual information tools for discussion”. However,because it is difficult to comprehend an entire discussion,it often necessary to also take notes. In such cases,the discussion is omitted and the details are represented in some kind of figure. However,is it possible for people to appropriately comprehend a discussion based on the information in such memos? This paper examines how the method of writing a memo during a discussion influences the content of a report of the discussion.
The participants consisted of 161 university students,who were randomly assigned to one of three groups;A:Control group;B:Complete-description group;and C:Visual-description group. Accordingly,group B was a non-structured discussion memo group that encouraged the participants to make strict time-sequenced notes. Group C was a structured memo group that made notes in the forms of abbreviations and figures. This study utilizes the text mining method to analyze differences between the memos and reports. The main findings are that post-discussion reports were more general and objective when using the structured discussion memo approach rather when using the non-structured discussion memo method. In short,the content of the reports changed depending on how memos of the discussion were made. This result indicates that visual information tools for discussion are effective for providing instruction about how to write structured discussion memos.
