A Learning Secret: Don’t Take Notes with a Laptop

[Suppressed]

A Learning Secret: Don’t Take Notes with a Laptop
Students who used longhand remembered more and had a deeper understanding of the material
By Cindi May on June 3, 2014
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret-don-t-take-notes-with-a-laptop/

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Laptops do in fact allow students to do more, like engage in online activities and demonstrations, collaborate more easily on papers and projects, access information from the internet, and take more notes.  Indeed, because students can type significantly faster than they can write, those who use laptops in the classroom tend to take more notes than those who write out their notes by hand.  Moreover, when students take notes using laptops they tend to take notes verbatim, writing down every last word uttered by their professor.

Obviously it is advantageous to draft more complete notes that precisely capture the course content and allow for a verbatim review of the material at a later date.  Only it isn’t.  New research by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer demonstrates that students who write out their notes on paper actually learn more.  Across three experiments, Mueller and Oppenheimer had students take notes in a classroom setting and then tested students on their memory for factual detail, their conceptual understanding of the material, and their ability to synthesize and generalize the information.  Half of the students were instructed to take notes with a laptop, and the other half were instructed to write the notes out by hand.  As in other studies, students who used laptops took more notes.  In each study, however, those who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who used took notes with their laptops.

What drives this paradoxical finding?  Mueller and Oppenheimer postulate that taking notes by hand requires different types of cognitive processing than taking notes on a laptop, and these different processes have consequences for learning.  Writing by hand is slower and more cumbersome than typing, and students cannot possibly write down every word in a lecture.  Instead, they listen, digest, and summarize so that they can succinctly capture the essence of the information.  Thus, taking notes by hand forces the brain to engage in some heavy “mental lifting,” and these efforts foster comprehension and retention.  ...

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Excerpt.  Read more at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret-don-t-take-notes-with-a-laptop/

[Fishrrman]

No laptops back in my school days, so I wrote notes by hand.
And it worked for me -- just the process of "writing" seemed to help with the "remembering" later on.

Worked on the railroad, too, when it was time to learn new territory or in classes there as well. For getting qualified on new territory I hadn't seen before, I would take a small looseleaf binder. The pages would have one or two vertical lines pre-drawn. As I went along, I'd add the significant "characteristics" of the line -- stations, switches, signals, highway crossings, etc. Then for review I'd hold a blank sheet of paper over the notes, and see if I could "progressively recall" each recorded detail.

When I could take a blank sheet of paper and enter everything in from memory, I knew I was ready to see the rules examiner and "get qualified".

(...did I ever tell ya the story about my first trip west on the Erie's "Delaware Division" from Pt. Jervis into Pennsylvania -- where the engineer "put me in the seat" running a train on railroad I'd never seen before, going up Gulf Summit mountain? I was holding the throttle in one hand, and my notebook in the other, trying to make notes as I ran the train. Still have that one, drawn out in a somewhat shaky hand!)

[Wingnut]

A Learning Secret: Don’t Take Notes with a Laptop
Students who used longhand remembered more and had a deeper understanding of the material.

Another secret know for years by anyone born who was taught cursive. 

[Free Vulcan]

As a lefty, I can greatly appreciate not having to write anything more than a grocery list anymore.

[endicom]

I find that a pen fits my hand much better. Or am I doing this wrong?

[Weird Tolkienish Figure]

I keep notes on my laptop/smartphone all the time. I heavily use the notes app and "notepad", and also Outlook has a notes feature too, in Exchange.

I've literally never met anyone else who does this. When people see me doing it they think I'm a freak or maybe a huge nerd.