Put Your Laptops Away
I don’t know about you, but as much as I love technology, I still REALLY love to make lists by hand. There is nothing as sweet and satisfying as taking a pen and crossing out a “to do”. And, as it turns out, the old fashioned way still has its advantages!
Most students today find it quicker and easier to pull out their laptop or tablet and bang away at the keys; they miss a lot less of the content and are able to gather the info quicker. However, the potential for distraction is higher (hello Facebook during a boring lecture) and retention is much different.
In a study published in Psychological Science, in 2014, Pam A. Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the University of California, Los Angeles, tested how note taking by hand vs. technology affects learning. And what they found was incredible.
When we type notes, we have the ability and therefore the tendency, to attempt to take notes verbatim- we don’t miss much. We can type faster than we can write so we are able to grab more of the content. However, the researchers found that the students who were taking notes by hand were forced to be more selective and that extra processing time with the material benefited them.
Mueller and Oppenheimer defined note-taking in two ways: generative and nongenerative. Generative note-taking involves summarizing, paraphrasing, and concept mapping, while nongenerative is like copying something word for word- like you can with a laptop. But why is note-taking so beneficial in the first place? There are two thoughts about that: the first is called the “encoding hypothesis”, the person taking notes is essentially processing and therefore will improve their retention. The second idea is called the “external-storage hypothesis”, this is the idea that you learn by being able to look back at your notes.
“For their first study, they took university students (the standard guinea pig of psychology) and showed them TED talks about various topics. Afterward, they found that the students who used laptops typed significantly more words than those who took notes by hand. When testing how well the students remembered information, the researchers found a key point of divergence in the type of question. For questions that asked students to simply remember facts, like dates, both groups did equally well. But for “conceptual-application” questions, such as, “How do Japan and Sweden differ in their approaches to equality within their societies?” the laptop users did “significantly worse.”
In the second study the researchers asked the students using laptops to try and avoid verbatim note taking, but they couldn’t seem to overcome that instinct and the more words they copied, the worse they did on recall tests. Fascinating.
For the third study, students were given the chance to review their notes in between the lecture and test; the team thought the opportunity to look at the notes they took on their laptops would improve their performance. However, that did not happen, the students taking notes by hand still performed better.
I’m not sure that everyone who reads this study will automatically run back to paper, but the study clearly has merit. As for me, I’ll continue to blend the best of both worlds- paper and technology. And, be grateful that I don’t HAVE to ( but sometimes I get to) sit in a lecture hall anymore and take copious notes. 🙂
Source: NPR
