In college lecture halls, the sound of fingers typing on laptops, iPads and smartphones is starting to drone out the actual lectures. More and more students continue to rely on technology to take notes, rather than writing them by hand. According to NPR, in a new study conducted by researchers Pam A. Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of UCLA, both methods of note-taking were compared, and hand-written notes came out on top.
College students were shown numerous TED talks and asked to take notes, finding that those with laptops wrote down many more words than the handwritten group, but that when asked “conceptual” questions, the laptop group performed worse than the handwriting group. The second study found the same results—When students tried to take notes verbatim on their laptops, they performed worse when asked about the actual ideas presented in the talks. In the third study, when students were allowed to look at their notes before the test, the laptop group still lost to the hand-written notes group.
Their study found that those who use hand notation were more precise and engaged with their notes than those who typed them. “When people type their notes, they have this tendency to try to take verbatim notes and write down as much of the lecture as they can,” Mueller told NPR. “The students who were taking longhand notes in our studies were forced to be more selective — because you can’t write as fast as you can type. And that extra processing of the material that they were doing benefited them.”
Basically, even if it seems better to write down every single word the professor is saying, it’s actually hurting you in the long run. When you’re forced to only write down a few words, you have to think more about how to summarize what you’re hearing—and that’s good for your learning and recall.
While the results of this study won’t stop the digital age, it should make you think twice about your note-taking strategy. “Note-taking is a pretty dynamic process,” cognitive psychologist Michael Friedman at Harvard University who studies note-taking systems, told the The Wall Street Journal. “You are transforming what you hear in your mind.