Mueller and Oppenheimer included a study in which participants were asked to take notes by hand or by laptop, and were told they would be tested on the material in a week. It is possible these direct instructions to improve the quality of laptop notes failed because it is so easy to rely on less demanding, mindless processes when typing. Despite these instructions, students using laptops showed the same level of verbatim content and were no better in synthesizing material than students who received no such warning. Mueller and Oppenheimer explored this idea by warning laptop note takers against the tendency to transcribe information without thinking, and explicitly instructed them to think about the information and type notes in their own words. If the source of the advantage for longhand notes derives from the conceptual processes they evoke, perhaps instructing laptop users to draft summative rather than verbatim notes will boost performance. By contrast, when typing students can easily produce a written record of the lecture without processing its meaning, as faster typing speeds allow students to transcribe a lecture word for word without devoting much thought to the content. Thus, taking notes by hand forces the brain to engage in some heavy “mental lifting,” and these efforts foster comprehension and retention. Instead, they listen, digest, and summarize so that they can succinctly capture the essence of the information.
#HANDWRITING NOTES VS TYPING NOTES HOW TO#
Learn more about active listening and how to improve a student’s active listening in this article.Writing by hand is slower and more cumbersome than typing, and students cannot possibly write down every word in a lecture. It’s a skill that’s required in order to take great study notes. Oxford Learning Can HelpĪctive listening is a skill. Read more about the best note-taking methods. This has nothing to do with how neat their handwriting is-it’s about how their notes are structured. If students’ in-class notes are messy, unorganized, and unclear at first glance, they’re not going to get much use out of them. Students will see it done in all sorts of ways, but there are a few tried and true techniques. However, as much as we’d like to think we will remember what a teacher or instructor said, most of us don’t have a memory that recalls everything.Īnd when it comes to textbooks and notes prepared by a student’s teacher, it may feel like overkill to make their notes, but they really should. Yes, there’s the issue of not writing enough or as robustly. Why Note-Taking is a Big Dealįirstly, students do not need to write down everything. And, of course, organize their notes immediately afterward and review them regularly. However, students need to override their instinct to write everything and instead be more selective. If students are still going to use a laptop or tablet over pen and paper, they’re not doomed. Researchers have also found that the actual processes involved in writing by hand mean students have a deeper understanding of the material. Yes, writing by hand is a slower task, but it makes it so that students have to be more selective in what they’re writing. Is there a difference between typing your notes on a laptop or tablet and using a pen and paper? Research indicates that physically writing things down appears to be the winner. Therefore students have to actually process the information and summarize it in a way that makes sense for them. Since handwriting is slower and more tedious, it makes it harder to take notes verbatim. When students take notes by hand, it develops a stronger conceptual understanding than by typing. Research published recently in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, echoes previous studies, such as one often-cited 2014 study called “ The Pen Is Mightier Than The Keyboard,” which shows that writing notes by hand allowed participants to retain information better than those who typed on a laptop, even if they wrote fewer words overall. A simple change can make things easier to recall on test day. One of the ways to better cement knowledge in your brain is to write your study notes by hand rather than type them. When it comes time to take during class or when studying, do you reach for a pen and paper, or do you reach for your laptop?