If like me, you suffer from having barely legible handwriting, you may have quickly embraced digital note-taking over writing out your lecture notes. Looking around a lecture theatre, it’s clear to see that many students use laptops, tablets, or their phones to jot down the content. And for good reason: typing is fast, your notes come out neat and compiled, and carrying fewer heavy notebooks around will save your back a lot of trouble.
A fact that many people may not be aware of, however, is that handwriting is far more effective at engaging our brains than typing is. According to an influential 2014 study by two psychological scientists at the University of California, students who took down their lecture notes with pen and paper had improved recall of the content over students who typed their notes on laptops. When the students were tested on the lecture content half an hour after the lecture and again after a week, the results were the same: the people who had handwritten their notes scored far better marks than the laptop-users.
There is still speculation as to why this may be. While the typists did take far more notes overall, the researchers suggested that the act of typing is less engaging for our brains than handwriting. It seems that forming each word with our hands as we write engages our motor memory more effectively.
This is hugely relevant to students because it means that we are more likely to remember information that we have written out on paper than something we have typed.
The added potential for distractions available on our devices – like the temptation of memes, checking email, or taking a quick Instagram scroll – could also be a contributing factor, but that is a separate issue to the way we process information.
Another important note is that copying your lecturer’s words verbatim is rarely helpful. In the study, it was also found that laptop users found it more difficult to write out the content in their own way, as they repeatedly reverted back to mindlessly copying the lecturer’s speech. This method may speed your note-taking up, but it may make the content less accessible for you to remember and understand when you review. Instead, try to summarise the content into your own words, and focus on the information that you know to be most important.
So, while there are pros and cons to both methods, handwriting has definitely won this round. If you struggle with illegibility or slowness when taking notes in lectures, though, a mix of both is probably the best solution. Use whichever technique helps you to get your thoughts down – whether that’s typing or recording (with permission!) and taking short notes. After class, however, it is crucial for you to take the time to review your notes and then write them out in full, the old-fashioned way.
Of course, as the years go by, people are being introduced to technology at ever younger ages, and this could have an impact on how we best process information. It will certainly be the topic of many more studies to see how future generations balance the efficiency of tech with the benefits of pen and paper.