Mueller and Oppenheimer postulate that taking notes by hand requires different types of cognitive processing than taking notes on a laptop, and these different processes have consequences for learning. Writing by hand is slower and more cumbersome than typing, and students cannot possibly write down every word in a lecture. Instead, they listen, digest, and summarize so that they can succinctly capture the essence of the information. By contrast, when typing students can easily produce a written record of the lecture without processing its meaning, as faster typing speeds allow students to transcribe a lecture word for word without devoting much thought to the content.
Some scientists are reportedly skeptical of the findings, wondering if the effects are overstated. Typing notes on a screen does have its benefits. Electronic documents can lend themselves to better organizational formatting. Let's look at some research. According to Beesley and Apthorp's meta-analysis , showing students how to take effective notes is strongly correlated with better achievement. One study from 20 years ago when computer notes would have been an unaffordable oddity tested college students to see if taking notes supported retention of factual knowledge Beeson, It did: the note-taking group scored better than a group who took no notes during the lecture, but later wrote essays about what they'd learned.
The note-taking group also outscored a control group who reviewed the material but did no writing at all. In short, we're more apt to remember stuff we take notes on.
The laptop seems like a perfect tool for taking notes. After all, most people can type faster than they can write and thus should be able to capture more of what's being said with less effort. Yet therein lies the problem. As it turns out, note taking isn't supposed to be easy—nor a transcription of classroom discourse.
It's more important that learners actively engage in learning by considering the essence of what a speaker is saying and including that essence in their notes. Here's the key takeaway:. Although more notes are beneficial, at least to a point, if the notes are taken indiscriminately or by mindlessly transcribing content, as is more likely the case on a laptop than when notes are taken longhand, the benefit disappears. In short, students ought to shut their laptops and write stuff down.
At issue here seems to be something cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has noted: "students remember … what they think about.
Moreover, digital devices may tempt students to think about other things besides learning, like formatting or messages from friends. The very act of handwriting appears to have important cognitive benefits.
Because of these and other cognitive benefits of handwriting, occupational therapists Stevenson and Just concluded that it's best to hold off on teaching keyboarding to children until ages 10 to 12, after they've fully developed the ability to write by hand.
But what about computers as a writing aid for children with learning disabilities, who might benefit from being unburdened of the fine motor skills writing requires? HuffPost Personal Video Horoscopes. Follow Us. Terms Privacy Policy. Part of HuffPost World News. All rights reserved. Of course, that's not to say technology in the classroom isn't the way of the future.
In this series, we dig into our strange phobias, fixations, and neuroses, and ask ourselves — Is This Normal? Does writing help me remember, or is it something else? Writing by hand really does have an effect on memory, according to multiple studies.
The most widely cited is a study that examined note-taking via pen-and-paper versus on a laptop among U. Researchers found that students taking notes the old-fashioned way were more able to correctly answer questions about the lecture they sat through. The team credits this to the fact that handwriting notes is a slower process, which means in order to keep up with the speed of the spoken word, students would analyze the information and rephrase in real time in order to capture the points most efficiently.
By contrast, students taking notes on laptops would take more notes; particularly speedy typers would create a verbatim transcript. But without the need to synthesize the information as part of the note-taking process, they retained less knowledge from the lecture.
How Forgetting Makes You Smarter. By contrast, typing or texting just involves identifying the right letter.
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