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.
This is a photo of a student taking notes by hand.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.
I agree with this, taking notes effectively allows one to engage in the lesson and concentrate more on what is being said by the lecturer. Taking notes not only allows a student to understand while writing but to also take note of the important parts mentioned in the lecture. Taking notes on laptops is indeed very distracting and students tend to become parrot writers and copy word for word what is being said which develops no part in our thinking.
taking notes on the other hand allows one to make the work understandable for themselves and can also be used as reference when studying later on. Writing notes down also saves one time from doing extra work such as saving and editing later on.
Laptops and modern technology is a wonderful thing but can also be very unreliable and if anything fails and the entire hard drive gets wiped out, the notes taken in class disappear along with many other ‘important’-music,pictures,games etc. – things a student relies on.
Many studies encourage learners to take notes by hand as it benefits them the most.
Our generation is a technological dependent one, we rely on it too much. We tend to forget that taking notes by hand is what has been done by many generations of people and gotten them very far.
I agree 100% with this article as I prefer writing my own notes during lectures rather than typing them out. Even in high school, I found that I passed a subject better when I took my own notes during class and sometimes made my own notes from textbooks and hand outs. I always found this helped me remember important concepts for longer periods of time.
People who write out their own notes remember them better than those who have typed them out. I believe this is because you process the information as you write it down. With note taking by hand, it is impossible to write down everything the lecturer says, therefore you have to summarize and phrase it into your own words, jotting down the important aspects and this initial selectivity leads to you remembering the information for a long time. You can also go back, adding new details the lecturer mentions to what you already have. Also, handwriting allows you to take notes in whichever format is easier for you to remember (mind maps, lists etc.) whereas with laptops you are limited by the word processor formats (Microsoft Word for example). Even drawing diagrams given to us during the lecture proves to be a problem for laptop users.
The number one problem with taking notes with a laptop lies in the fact that some laptop users have a very high number of words that they can type per minute and therefore end up attempting to take down everything the lecturer says word for word. This then leads to them not remembering it in the long term because the brain didn’t have to do any rephrasing or summarizing which helps you remember things for longer periods of time.
I agree 100% with this article as I prefer writing my own notes during lectures rather than typing them out. Even in high school, I found that I passed a subject better when I took my own notes during class and sometimes made my own notes from textbooks and hand outs. It always made remembering certain aspects easier.
People who write out their own notes remember them better than those who have typed them out. I believe this is because you process the information as you write it down. With note taking by hand, it is impossible to write down everything the lecturer says, therefore you have to summarize and phrase it into your own words, jotting down the important aspects and this initial selectivity leads to you remembering the information for a long time. You can also go back, adding new details the lecturer mentions to what you already have. Also, handwriting allows you to take notes in whichever format is easier for you to remember (mind maps, lists etc.) whereas with laptops you are limited by the word processor formats (Microsoft Word for example). Even drawing diagrams given to us during the lecture proves to be a problem for laptop users.
The number one problem with taking notes with a laptop lies in the fact that some laptop users have a very high number of words that they can type per minute and therefore end up attempting to take down everything the lecturer says word for word. This then leads to them not remembering it in the long term because the brain didn’t have to do any rephrasing or summarizing which helps you remember things for longer periods of time.
Technology has made our lives easier and more convenient. However his may not be as beneficial to mankind in the long run as we are lead to believe.
From personal experience I have found that by taking down notes using a pen and paper during lectures I concentrate more on the content of what the lecturer is saying. Thereby I am able to recognise the crucial facts in the lecture.
On average most people (including myself) are able to type faster than what they can write.While typing the mind has to process more information in a limited time period which makes it difficult for the brain to structure all the information. In other words you are simply mindlessly retyping the information without it being properly processed.
The advent of computers has helped note-taking to become easier. However this has made us all lazier.
I am currently a first year student and I have been writing notes by hand throughout my high school career and I still do this now in order to study for tests. I’ve always found this method of studying to be effective as I understand the work better and the information seems to be stored in my long term memory better than if I were to merely read a text book or type out the notes on my laptop. However I prefer to listen in class and then write my own notes after going over the work again at home.
It is exciting to see that this has been somewhat proven scientifically!!
Razeena Bhol 14156343
As a university student I definitely can agree with this post as I have previously made notes using either a laptop or an iPad and they aren’t as effective when using them as study notes as the hand written notes are. The advancement of technology has however created the stylus which is a “pen” for touch-screen devices which can give us the illusion of actually writing notes electronically. This can however be a problem as there still are other distractions on the touch-screen device that can hinder note taking.
The technological society has created many advancements that make our lives easier and highly beneficial. It has become incorporated in our daily lifestyles, however we are unaware about the repercussions it might pose later on in our lives. Note taking has been scientifically proven to enhance memory and provide better understanding of learning material in the long run. Personally binding a pen to paper in my everyday lectures has allowed me to think faster and recall conceptual concepts better, than using electronic devices. By using laptops and IPADS, I have noticed we become enticed into the world of games, leisure fantasies and never-ending social network regimes.
Being at university our minds tend to deviate in other dimensions via technology. I can honestly say I’m not a victim of this insanity, but my classmates are. In the long run their brains will not be able to recall information imperative to sustainable learning. Thus, I strongly feel that we need to utilize our hands to paper and concentrate on those words we write since it is the foundation, for a long line of innovative learning techniques. Throughout my 12 years of schooling, note taking via paper has enhanced my overall ability to comprehend in the classroom thus allowing me to reap the rewards in class-based assessments. In university I continue to maintain this technique of pen to paper, knowing that I will benefit greatly, later on in my academic career.
More people should break free of the webs of the 21st technology and practice the basic element of using a pen and paper. If we all do this, then we become inclined to learn better during our lectures.
People differ. Our brains function differently from one another. I might find studying through use of pictures effective, whereas someone else prefer using words or diagrams. The effectivity of tools during note-taking thus varies from person to person.
The results attained during the experiment might prove hand-written notes more effective, but we to take into account the fact that the whole concept of digital note-taking is new to us. Very few of us used tablets or laptops during our high school education-the problem being that our brain is still adapting to the idea of taking notes digitally.
Also, we need to consider the fact that digital note-taking is not as user-friendly as your trusty notepad and pencil. Digital resources forces us to conform to a certain format. For instance, when taking notes on a word processing program me such as Microsoft Word, one is forced to type and navigate in way true to letters and essays. This limits the author’s ability to express the idea they wish freely.
I thus agree with the discovery made by the study- or at least, for now.
The old cliché “practice makes perfect” is very relevant to this article when you consider that since primary school (I assume) the majority of people used a pen and paper more than they used a laptop. In my opinion, the reason that people are better at remembering and understanding things that they wrote down as opposed to things that they typed out is because for the majority of our childhood we wrote down our homework, our tests and exams, and our notes using a pen. This means that we have had far much more practice writing everything down opposed to typing everything out.
In this day and age, technology plays a huge role in the way we communicate so naturally we will use it a lot. However, even though we may use electronic devices a lot, we use it for many different reasons in school than we do say, in university. In school, we may have needed to type out essays or learn skills on computers but we might not have actually used a laptop to take down notes. In this sense, using a laptop can be very different – you do not need to listen to anyone when you are writing an essay. So, essentially we have had a lot more practice at taking down notes using a pen than we have had with a laptop and we would be better at taking down notes with a pen. Bearing this in mind, the results make sense because if the majority of those students went through school writing a lot of information down with a pen but not actually typing out notes, then they would do better taking down notes with pen than with a laptop, which is the case here.
I know that technology plays a big role in society today but I do think that if we had spent most of our school days taking down notes on an electronic device, then the results in this experiment would have leaned positively towards those using laptops. It is a big matter of practice so I think the results just prove that if you train the brain from a young age it can help an individual later on in life, especially when it comes to note-taking.
The applications that are accompanied with technology today have been very useful in helping students learn or take notes when under pressure. These ‘digital notes’ can then be printed or emailed to another student, which is even more effective then the current way of studying, learning or taking notes.
Although the use of the advanced technologies that have been released thus far may be advantageous to students’ or any person’s learning, I have found that having the actual notes in hardcopy-form is better for learning, as it can be easier to edit the notes afterwards for study purposes as well as making better sense of what has been recorded or noted.
According to the article, the subjects who actually hand-wrote the notes, understood more of the topic than the subjects who typed out the notes.
In my own experience, I also found that after having used the ready-typed notes on my iPad, I was able to keep up with the lecturer, but after many other lectures I found it hard to make the effort to review those notes or even print them out. For the future I will now understand that having printed notes before-hand and then being able to edit the notes by hand during lectures will be a much more effective way of learning and studying particular topics that are taught during lectures.
As many university students may agree, if one has the privilege to make use of advanced technological instruments e.g. tablets, laptops and notepads, one may realise just how convenient these instruments may become in taking study/lecture notes. However in the long term this way of note taking may indeed be less effective as when one actually writes down the notes with hand.
From experience I for instance tend to remember and better recall the notes I have written down during a lecture, this contributes to the learning path as a whole, from the note taking process to writing the actual exam.
In my opinion not only students but everyone else should write down their own notes because although technology can assist in many ways, it will never have the same effect.
Student number: 14113351
as a first year university student, i agree with many of the posts on this blog that students today rely on technology to take notes in class. some of my lectures allow me to obtain my notes online before hand and only require me to add information here and there while the lesson progresses. when doing so, i sometimes dont actually process what I am writing when making the note as i am trying to quickly do so before the lecturer moves on and simply copy it down.
However, in some lectures when i actually write down everything from scratch and use different colours with quick diagrams on my page, it makes revising and learning easier for me as i already have a brief understanding and tend to recall certain points when referring to my diagrams or “quick notes.”
This blog is extremely relative to students, particularly first year university students. As a first year, myself, I find that my iPad has been umbically attached to me. I do not attend a lecture without it in my bag. the many advances in technology, specifically designed ‘educational’ apps and it’s claims to improve the life of a student, has actually resulted in a decrease in concentration levels and a disregardment of the work taught during a lecture. A computer provides us with neatness and coherence which sometimes cannot be achieved by handwritten notes. According to Makany, Kemp & Dror (2009) such educational tools are useful to create clear and concise notes. But the downfall is that these devices are the ultimate distraction during a lecture.
Note taking by hand allows us to have control on our learning; diagrams, mind maps, short hand notes as to capture every minuscule information.
I have discovered by experimenting with both an iPad and handwritten notes, there has been an improvement in my results, concentration level and the ability to recall and understand my work merely by relying on handwritten notes. Sure, we can write on our iPads but how often do we go back and check whether everything has been noted?
Most students can relate to the trend of the blog. Trying to get the most out of a lecture is one of the most difficult tasks for a student. I’m sure everyone has tried taking notes on an electronic device opposed to taking notes by hand. I think that limiting better performance to only taking notes by hand is generalisation. Some people do perform better on a laptop for example some people can type faster than they write. The results of a study done on university students, it was found that 87% of the students that had laptops felt that their grades have improved due to the use of a laptop as note taking instrument. It would have been interesting to see statistics in regard to how much time was spent on revision and filing of the notes, as revision is a very important key in long term comprehension. With an electronic device all the notes are sure to be organised very well. Some people might even loose the papers they worked on, or don’t organise it very well. Which can make revision a difficult task in the long run. Thus I agree with some previous comments that note taking which delivers the best performance can be different from person to person. Note taking methods should be followed by students that best fit their capabilities.
Being a first year student i get exposed to these different types of learning. in university you do get people that prefer doing things the old way, that is taking down notes by hand, putting pen to paper as they say. i suppose in my personal experience i prefer to take down notes by hand. it might be harder but at least i can comprehend what i have learnt and taken down in class. You get people that rely or rather prefer to do it the modern way, with the use of technology. i do not dislike the use of technology, people have different ways of understanding what is put forward to them. I understand better by taking my own notes and formulating sentences that i can understand and in the long run i remember better. i have tried to do the modern way of learning, but unfortunately i kept taking down what the lecturer said without understanding and this proved to be a difficult task. i would say that note taking has much more benefits to a individual than notes taken on the computer.
Most students can relate to the trend of the blog. Trying to get the most out of a lecture is one of the most difficult tasks for a student. I’m sure everyone has tried taking notes on an electronic device opposed to taking notes by hand. I think that limiting better performance to only taking notes by hand is generalisation. Some people do perform better on a laptop for example some people can type faster than they write. This blog also doesn’t focus on the long term aspects like keeping the notes in place. With an electronic device all the notes are sure to be organised very well. Some people might even loose the papers they worked on, or don’t organise it very well. Which can make revision a difficult task in the long run. Thus I think note taking which delivers the best performance can be different from person to person.
This is so true. It is like how you likely to forget information in a textbook or forget where to find it but that hardly happens with hand written notes. It is also in coordination with how we read things and make sense of them before we write them down yet with laptops we literally coping and pasting and therefore do not save what we typing into our brains. I believe it also has to do with how we get to design our own notes, hence comes the warning that you can’t study with someone’s note.
This is so true. It is like how you likely to forget information in a textbook or forget where to find it but that hardly happens with hand written notes. It is also in coordination with how we read things and make sense of them before we write them down yet with laptops we literally coping and pasting and therefore do not save what we typing into our brains. I believe it also has to do with how we get to design our own notes, hence comes the warning that ‘you can’t study with someone’s note’
As a student I can fully relate to the topic being discussed in this article. Technology has taken over schooling systems, it is now compulsory for students in some schools to have an Ipad or tablet with them in class, this is very troubling as the younger generations may become more efficient note takers but whilst they increase quantity they are decreasing the quality of the work they are able to submit.
When you write your notes out by hand you are able to change the words or phrases to help you as an individual to understand the work being explained, you are able to use colours, which as previously mentioned assists the brain in liking information together, and you are able to quickly take down the necessary diagrams without the hassle of dealing with complicated technology. Even if you are copying someone else’s handwritten or typed notes, you are not picking up or understanding the information being explained, you are mindlessly scribbling down the words in front of you and your brain is not given the opportunity to absorb any of the information in the notes which is a waste of valuable time.
In the end we are all going to do what is best for ourselves, we learn different things in different ways, I believe that hand writing your notes is more effective but what everyone else does is entirely up to them.
Ross Schwartz (14091136)
As a university student I can relate fully to the topic of the article and have experienced it on a first hand basis. From previous posts I can see majority agree with the article and most likely experienced it for themselves due to the fact that we live in a world where technology surrounds us.
The article mentions studies that were conducted which help back up the information in the article. Taking notes by hand instead of using a computer or tablet has far more benefits, it is easy to become distraction when using a computer or tablet as there are many games and apps that can be accessed at a click of a button which will lead to poor participation and the loss of vital information in the lecture. Handwriting assists memory, when taking notes by hand you are able to combine words and images together i.e.- drawing diagrams.
Of course taking notes by hand or on a computer is the individuals choice, some might prefer the computer approach for note taking and it could work for them, but majority will benefit far more by taking notes by hand.