Technology makes everything better, right? Well when it comes to taking notes the answer might be no. Aside from the fact that technology, in this case laptops, can be highly and frustratingly unreliable, recent findings have shown that taking notes by hand is actually better for subject retention and long-term comprehension. Some professors are even using it as a reason to ban laptops in their lectures. While this may be a bummer for the frat guy watching SportsCenter in your forum class, it may be the reason you get an A on your SC 200 final.
We all know that typing is quicker and easier than writing most of the time. With that, I know very few people who can write faster than they can type. Typing allows us to capture almost verbatim what our professors are saying in a fast paced class. However, an article published in the Scientific American cites a study conducted by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer that examined the paradoxical finding that more notes does not always mean a higher grade. They assigned half a classroom to take notes by hand and the other half take notes on a lap top. Afterwards, they tested the students’ memory, conceptual understanding and ability to synthesize the information. Although the students who used laptops had more notes, the students who had taken their notes by hand,
“…had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who used took notes with their laptops.”
-CIndi May, Scientific American
Huh? Why would more notes be worse for your learning? To further explore this question Mueller and Oppenheimer analyzed notes taken by hundreds of students from Princeton and UCLA. They covered a wide array of topics that included everything from bread to economics. They found that notes taken on laptops were more or less direct transcriptions of the lecture. They reported that these notes were mindlessly copied with little analysis. Mueller and Oppenheimer postulate that taking notes by hand actually requires different kinds of cognitive processing than those required in taking notes on a computer. One reason they believe greater learning to be associated with handwritten notes is the fact that you must be more selective with what you write down; often times professors move through information faster than students can copy their notes. Instead of copying your professors every word, instead you have to assess the information and choose what is most crucial. This action of selecting what is important is what the researches believe engages the cognitive processes believed to have a higher impact on factual retention and conceptual understanding.
Hey, so if you really love taking notes on your laptop and this post is upsetting you, think about how light your backpack would be with a notebook and not a laptop and charger!
Personally, I can’t take notes on a laptop because I know that I will get distracted halfway through the lecture and find myself on twitter or doing work for other classes. Now I used to think (like everyone else) that I was the best multitasker in State College. It turns out that none of us are good at multitasking. An interesting NPR story I read explores the science behind multitasking and how it is technically impossible for the human brain.
“As technology allows people to do more tasks at the same time, the myth that we can multitask has never been stronger. But researchers say it’s still a myth — and they have the data to prove it. Humans, they say, don’t do lots of things simultaneously. Instead, we switch our attention from task to task extremely quickly.”
-Jon Hamilton, NPR
The moral of the story is that we should leave our laptops to Netflix and doing work outside of classes. In this case, our parents and grandparents may have gotten it right. Now while the research is still inconclusive as to why hand writing notes facilitates better learning but it is rational to assume that breaking out that college ruled notebook could be worth a shot. When it comes to lectures, don’t overcomplicate it.