Dust off those Bic ballpoints and college-ruled notebooks — research shows that taking notes by hand is better than
taking notes on a laptop for remembering conceptual information over the long
term. The findings are published in Psychological
Science,
a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Walk into any university lecture hall and you’re likely to see
row upon row of students sitting behind glowing laptop screens. Laptops in
class have been controversial, due mostly to the many opportunities for
distraction that they provide (online shopping, browsing Reddit, or playing
solitaire, just to name a few). But few studies have examined how effective
laptops are for the students who diligently take notes.
“Our new findings suggest that even when laptops are used as
intended — and not for buying things on Amazon during class — they may still be
harming academic performance,” says psychological scientist Pam Mueller of
Princeton University, lead author of the study.
Mueller was prompted to investigate the question after her own
experience of switching from laptop to pen and paper as a graduate teaching
assistant:
“I felt like I’d gotten so much more out of the lecture that
day,” says Mueller, who was working with psychology researcher Daniel
Oppenheimer at the time. “Danny said that he’d had a related experience in a
faculty meeting: He was taking notes on his computer, and looked up and
realized that he had no idea what the person was actually talking about.”
Mueller and Oppenheimer, who is now at the UCLA Anderson School
of Management, conducted a series of studies to investigate whether their
intuitions about laptop and longhand note-taking were true.
In the first study, 65 college students watched one of five TED
Talks covering topics that were interesting but not common knowledge. The
students, who watched the talks in small groups, were either given laptops (disconnected
from Internet) or notebooks, and were told to use whatever strategy they
normally used to take notes.
The students then completed three distractor tasks, including a
taxing working memory task. A full 30 minutes later, they had to answer
factual-recall questions (e.g., “Approximately how many years ago did the Indus
civilization exist?”) and conceptual-application questions (e.g., “How do Japan
and Sweden differ in their approaches to equality within their societies?”)
based on the lecture they had watched.
The results revealed that while the two types of note-takers
performed equally well on questions that involved recalling facts, laptop
note-takers performed significantly worse on the conceptual questions.
The notes from laptop users contained more words and more
verbatim overlap with the lecture, compared to the notes that were written by
hand. Overall, students who took more notes performed better, but so did those
who had less verbatim overlap, suggesting that the benefit of having more content
is canceled out by “mindless transcription.”
“It may be that longhand note takers engage in more processing
than laptop note takers, thus selecting more important information to include
in their notes, which enables them to study this content more efficiently,” the
researchers write.
Surprisingly, the researchers saw similar results even when they
explicitly instructed the students to avoid taking verbatim notes, suggesting
that the urge to do so when typing is hard to overcome.
The researchers also found that longhand note takers still beat
laptop note takers on recall one week later when participants were given a
chance to review their notes before taking the recall test. Once again, the
amount of verbatim overlap was associated with worse performance on conceptual
items.
“I don’t anticipate that we’ll get a mass of people switching
back to notebooks,” says Mueller, “but there are several new stylus
technologies out there, and those may be the way to go to have an electronic
record of one’s notes, while also having the benefit of being forced to process
information as it comes in, rather than mindlessly transcribing it.”
“Ultimately, the take-home message is that people should be more
aware of how they are choosing to take notes, both in terms of the medium and
the strategy,” Mueller concludes.
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