Why You Should Take Notes by Hand, Not on a Laptop

Walk into a college lecture these days and you'll see legions of students sitting
behind glowing screens, pecking away at keyboards.

Presumably, they're using the computers to take notes, so they better remember
the course material. But new research shows that if learning is their goal, using a
laptop during class is a terrible idea.

Taking notes by hand forces you to actively listen and decide what's important. It's
not just because internet-connected laptops are so distracting. It's because even if
students aren't distracted, the act of taking notes on a computer actually seems to
interfere with their ability to remember information.

Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer, the psychologists who conducted the new
research, believe it's because students on laptops usually just mindlessly type
everything a professor says. Those taking notes by hand, though, have to actively
listen and decide what's important because they generally can't write fast
enough to get everything down which ultimately helps them learn. Laptop users
remember less information later on.

The psychologists' new paper involved three different studies comparing students'
recall after taking notes on a (non-internet connected) laptop versus by hand, with
327 undergraduates from UCLA and Princeton in total.

For the first study, the students watched a 15-minute TED talk and took notes on
it, then took a test on it half an hour afterward. Some of the test questions were
straightforward, asking for a particular figure or fact, while others were conceptual,
and asked students to compare or analyze ideas.
The two groups of students laptop users and hand-writers did pretty similarly
on the factual questions. But the laptop users did significantly worse on the
conceptual ones.

The researchers also noticed that the laptop users took down many more words,
and were more likely to take down speech from the video verbatim.

To see if this rote note-taking was part of the problem, for the second study, they
explicitly instructed some of the laptop users to do otherwise: "Take notes in your
own words and dont just write down word-for-word what the speaker is saying,"
they said.

The overachieving college students, though, were a heedlessly diligent bunch.
Even in this study, the laptop users were once again much more likely to take
down notes from the videos verbatim, and once again performed more poorly on
the conceptual questions whether they'd gotten the instructions to avoid word-
for-word notes or not. The laptop users performed similarly on factual questions,
but significantly worse on conceptual ones.

Both of these studies, though, eliminated a key benefit of laptop note-taking: the
ability to look over a much more complete set of notes while studying. So as a final
test, the researchers had students watch a seven-minute lecture (taking notes
either on a laptop or by hand), let a week pass, then gave some of the students
ten minutes to study their notes before taking a test.

Having time to study mattered, but only for students who'd taken notes by hand.
These students did significantly better on both conceptual and factual questions.
But studying didn't help laptop users at all, and even made them perform slightly
worse on the test.
The researchers explain this by noting previous research, showing the act of note-
taking can be just as important as a later study of notes in helping students learn.

When done with pen and paper, that act involves active listening, trying to figure
out what information is most important, and putting it down. When done on a
laptop, it generally involves robotically taking in spoken words and converting
them into typed text. Laptops are also incredibly distracting.

This new research suggests that even when students aren't doing anything else,
taking notes on a laptop hinders their ability to learn. This is something of a
surprise.

What isn't a surprise, though, is that real-life students that use laptops seldom
focus on the lecture. Research shows students who use laptops perform more
poorly in classes.

You probably know this if you've looked across a lecture hall recently. But in case
you want confirmation from professionals, research on both undergrads and law
students has shown that those who use laptops have something unrelated to class
up on their screens around 40 percent of the time. Ultimately, they perform more
poorly in classes and rate themselves as less satisfied with their college
educations.

None of this is rocket science. You're on the internet right now, and there's a good
chance you're reading this article while distracted from work you're supposed to be
doing. I work on the internet all day and still find it immensely distracting and at
times, I turn it off to focus on something.

But the crazy thing is that the many college students being distracted by their
laptops are simultaneously paying tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of
doing so.

Science and common sense are both pretty clear here. If you want to learn
something from a class or lecture or, from that matter, a meeting, conference,
or any other situation where you're basically sitting and listening you're best off
taking notes with pen and paper.


Why Students Using Laptops Learn Less in Class
Even When They Really Are Taking Notes

For taking notes in class, one of these methods is considerably better than the
other.

Are you one of those old-school types who insist that kids learn better when they
leave the laptops at home and take lecture notes in longhand?

If so, youre right. Theres new evidence to prove it, and its unsettling because so
many students arent really taught longhand anymore.

According to a new study based on a series of lab-based experiments comparing
how much students learned after listening to the same lectures, theres no contest.
Hand writers learn better, hands down.

The ones who took their notes in longhand demonstrated in tests that they got
more out of the lectures than the typists.

Its not for the reasons most people think either. Its not because of multi-tasking
or the distraction available to students using laptops, especially with Wi Fi. Thats a
problem by itself. But for this study, in a lab setting, no extraneous activity was
allowed.

Even when students paid attention and took copious notes on their laptops, they
still didnt learn as well. In fact, the copiousness of their notes may be part of the
problem, the study found.

Laptop users are inclined to use long verbatim quotes, which they type somewhat
mindlessly. The hand writers are more selective. They wrote significantly fewer
words than those who typed.

It may be, the researchers reported, that longhand note takers engage in more
processing than laptop note takers, thus selecting more important information to
include in their notes, which enables them to study more efficiently.

The authors are psychologists Pam A. Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel
M. Oppenheimer of the University of California-Los Angeles. The study, entitled
The Pen Is Mightier than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand over Laptop
Note Taking, is published online in the journal Psychological Science. Its also
summarized here.

The researchers conducted three separate studies involving a total of 327 students
to reach their conclusions. All students got the same lectures, but some were told
to use laptops and others were told to take notes by hand.

When it came to learning the concepts in the lectures, the hand writers won.
When it came to retrieving facts, the groups were comparable, except when given
time to go home and look at their notes and study some more, at which point,
once again, the hand writers did better.

Even when allowed to review notes after a weeks delay, participants who had
taken notes with laptops performed worse on tests of both factual content and
conceptual understanding

Overall, the researchers reported:

When tested on what they had heard, the students taking notes learned better.
They came away with a significantly better conceptual understanding and did no
worse than the laptop users when it came to recalling facts.

Heres whats a little bit frightening. When they instructed the laptop students to
cut down or eliminate the verbatim note-taking, they couldnt.

The researchers wrote:

Laptop use can negatively affect performance on educational assessments, even,
or perhaps especially, when the computer is used for its intended function of
easier note-taking. Although more notes are beneficial, at least to a point, if the
notes are taken indiscriminately or by mindlessly transcribing content, as is more
likely the case on a laptop than when notes are taken longhand, the benefit
disappears.

In fact, the study adds to a ton of evidence that for learning, writing is better and
that the hand has a unique relationship with the brain when it comes to
composing thoughts and ideas.

Thats been supported by studies involving brain scans as well. Writing by hand
activates the brain in ways that typing doesnt to improve learning.

Of course, the chance of convincing students to put away their laptops is probably
zero. Many of them cant write longhand, a forgotten subject in many American
schools, itself a source of controversy.

So is there hope? Maybe, Mueller said in an e-mail to The Washington Post:

Since we found that this is a result of laptop users tendency to take verbatim
notes, it is possible that if we could teach children to take non-verbatim, selective
notes on their laptops (i.e., like one is forced to do when writing longhand), they
would perform equivalently to longhand note takers. However we found that
telling people not to take verbatim notes just didnt work, so whatever intervention
one might imagine might be rather difficult.

The other possibility, some have suggested, are apps that permit handwriting on
tablets, a compromise perhaps that students might accept.