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