Does it make a difference if you take notes with pen and paper or on a laptop? Yes, says a new study, and laptop users are at a definite disadvantage. News of the study comes via the Huffington Post column of Wray Herbert, one of my favorite writers on psychology. According to Herbert, psychologists Pam Mueller of Princeton and Daniel Oppenheimer of UCLA ran several related experiments aimed at evaluating how well written vs. typed notetaking helped students learn. In the first of these experiments, ” . . . college students were assigned to classrooms, some of which were equipped with laptops and others with traditional notebooks. They all listened to the same lectures, and they were specifically instructed to use their usual note-taking strategy. Then, about half an hour after the lecture, all of the students were tested on the material covered in the lecture. Importantly, they were tested both for factual recall (How many years ago did the Indus civilization exist?) and for conceptual learning (How do Japan and Sweden differ in their approaches to social equality?). This experiment provided preliminary evidence that laptops might be harmful to academic performance. The students using laptops were in fact more likely to take copious notes, which can be beneficial to learning. But they were also more likely to take verbatim notes, and this ‘mindless transcription’ appeared to cancel out the benefits. Both groups memorized about the same number of facts from the lectures, but the laptop users did much worse when tested on ideas.” Mueller and Oppenheimer also ran another experiment in which the test of learning came a full week after the notetaking session. The participants who took notes by hand, Herbert writes, ” . . . did significantly better than any of the other students in the experiment—better even than the fleet typists who had basically transcribed the lectures. That is, they took fewer notes overall with less verbatim recording, but they nevertheless did better on both factual learning and higher-order conceptual learning. Taken together, these results suggest that longhand notes not only lead to higher quality learning in the first place; they are also a superior strategy for storing new learning for later study. Or, quite possibly, these two effects interact for greater academic performance overall.” Couldn’t instructors just tell students who take notes on their computers not to transcribe what they hear word for word? Mueller and Oppenheimer tried that, but it didn’t work, Herbert reports: “The laptop users still made verbatim notes, which diminished their learning. Apparently there is something about typing that leads to mindless processing. And there is something about ink and paper that prompts students to go beyond merely hearing and recording new information—and instead to process and reframe information in their own words.” Brilliant readers, do you prefer to take notes in writing or on the screen? Why do you think your choice works better for you? anniemurphypaul/2014/01/pen-and-paper-note-taking-superior-to-typing-on-a-laptop/
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 13:10:06 +0000
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