Take Notes by Hand or Electronically? By Deborah Williams

Today’s students are very attached to their electronic devices.  That includes their laptops.  Most prefer to type papers and to take notes that way, but is that good for them to do?  A report on the Science Daily website about a recent study by researchers found that taking notes on laptops may not be the best option.  Princeton University’s Pam Mueller, lead author of the study, reports, “Our new findings suggest that even when laptops are used as intended — and not for buying things on Amazon during class — they may still be harming academic performance.”
Mueller and her UCLA colleague, Daniel Oppenheimer, conducted as series of studies that asked college students to take notes on a TED Talks video about topics for which they had little knowledge.  Some were given laptops and others received notebooks.  The only other instructions were to take notes in their usual fashion.  After their viewings, the respondents completed three distracter tasks.  Thirty minutes after completing the tasks, students answered factual-recall questions about the video they watched.  Researchers found that both groups of students performed equally well when recalling facts, but those who took notes by hand performed significantly better than those who used laptops to take notes.
That’s not all the researchers found:

• It may be 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 this content more efficiently.
• The researchers also found that longhand note takers still beat laptop note takers on recall one week later when participants were given a chance to review their notes before taking the recall test

Not convinced?  Technology has created a compromise platform that combines both: