I pack my bag and take with me... The relationship between documentation brought by students and performance in openbook exams

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is an increasing demand for forward-thinking and problem-solving-oriented exam formats in higher education . Open-book exams, in which learning materials are brought in, have long been proposed as an alternative exam format. This study with 113 participants investigates whether the amount and type of learning materials brought in have an impact on performance in multiple-choice questions on conceptual and procedural knowledge. The amount of brought in annotated lecture slides showed a significant, positive correlation with performance in both forms of knowledge. These findings are related to ICAP theory, which highlights underlying learning activities.