The pen is mightier than the keyboard: advantages of longhand over laptop note taking

Mueller, P. A., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological science, 0956797614524581.‏ http://drawingchildrenintoreading.com/assets/the_pen_is_mightier_than_the_keyboard-libre.pdf

 

Some of you are probably familiar with that moment in a lecture when the speaker promises to "email the presentation" but some people continue to take notes by hand.  When asked, they usually say things like: "writing helps me learn/understand better"; "I understand it better through my hand" etc.

 

Is it really so?

 

There is a substantial literature on the general effectiveness of note taking in educational settings, but it mostly predates laptop use in classrooms. Research shows that processing which takes place during note taking improves learning and recall of the material.  The existence of the notes enables people to review the material, an action that strengthens learning further.

 

Note taking can be generative (e.g., summarizing, paraphrasing, concept mapping) or nongenerative (i.e., verbatim copying). Verbatim note taking has generally been seen to indicate relatively shallow cognitive processing.  The more deeply information is processed during note taking, the greater the encoding benefits. Verbatim note taking predicts poorer performance than nonverbatim note taking, especially on integrative and conceptual items.

 

Laptop use facilitates verbatim transcription of lecture content because most students can type significantly faster than they can write (this is probably not true for school children, except maybe in high school).  The slower rate of manual note taking forces the writer to discriminate between what's important and what's less important, and to rephrase the main ideas rather than to write verbatim.

 

In order to find out how manual note taking influences learning and understanding of lectures (versus laptop note taking), Mueller& Oppenheimer conducted three experiments.

 

Sixty five students from Princeton University participated in the first study. They watched TED talks, each of them about 15 minutes long.  The researchers chose   topics that were interesting but not common knowledge.

Participants were instructed to use their normal classroom note-taking strategy.  Half of the students took note by hand and half by laptop. Then the students performed distraction tasks for 30 minutes, after which they answered factual-recall questions  and conceptual-application questions  about the lecture.  On factual-recall questions, participants performed equally well across conditions (manual vs. laptop note taking). However, on conceptual-application questions, laptop participants performed significantly worse than longhand participants.

 

There were several qualitative differences between laptop and longhand notes.  Participants who took longhand notes wrote significantly fewer words   than those who typed.   Laptop notes contained an average of 14.6% verbatim overlap with the lecture, whereas longhand notes averaged only 8.8%.  This difference was significant, and it means that the longhand notes reflected deeper processing of the material than the laptop notes.

 

In the second experiment, participants were 151 students from the University of California.  In this experiment, the researchers asked a subgroup of laptop note takers to refrain from verbatim note taking ("take notes in your own words and don’t just write down word-for-word what the speaker is saying”).  They wanted to know whether this instruction will affect the student's success in the test.  Another group of students took longhand notes and a third group took laptop notes without instruction to write in their own words.

 

In this experiment, too, students who took manual notes performed better on conceptual-application questions than students who took notes on a laptop.    The instruction to not take verbatim notes was completely ineffective at reducing verbatim content.    The   verbatim overlap of laptop-nonintervention participants  was 12.11%, and  of  laptop-intervention participants was 12.07%.

 

In the third experiment, the researchers wanted to see if the note's length influences the quality of learning when participants get a chance to review the material prior to being tested.   Participants were 109 students from the University of California.  They watched four seven minute lectures and took notes on a laptop or by hand.  They were told they would be returning the following week to be tested on the material.   When participants returned, those in the study condition were given 10 min to study their notes before being tested. Participants in the no-study condition immediately took the test.

Participants who took longhand notes and were able to study them performed significantly better than participants in any of the other conditions (handwritten notes and no review, laptop notes and no review, laptop notes and review).  When participants were unable to study, there was no difference between laptop and longhand note taking

 

To summarize, the combination of handwritten notes and reviewing the material lead to the best learning.  The reason for that could be the deeper processing that takes place when people take notes by hand.  This deeper processing leads to better, more conceptualized notes.  Reviewing such notes is more efficient.  Although manual notes are shorter than laptop notes, they are also more conceptualized and integrative and lead to better learning.

 

I suppose these findings are relevant mostly to high school students, since they are more likely than younger children to type automatically and faster than they write.  Nevertheless, these findings illuminate the importance of manual note taking to the learning process.