Students Who Take Longhand Lecture Notes Do Better Than Laptop Transcribers

Not mentioned here is that those using a laptop are easily distracted by opportunities for web surfing. I'd rather my students had their textbooks out, leafing through pages, while I cover material on the whiteboard and engage students in discussion. Indeed, I get less eye contact and material awareness from students who use computers. I don't like them in the classroom at all.

Professor Dan Drezner tweets this PuffHo piece, and from the article:

BREAKING: taking notes by longhand > taking notes on a laptop. http://t.co/gaKbigpneY

— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) February 2, 2014

The findings, which Mueller and Oppenheimer describe in a forthcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, were a bit surprising. Those who took notes in longhand, and were able to study, 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.

The scientists had an additional, intriguing finding. At one point, they told some of the laptop users explicitly not to simply transcribe the lectures word-by-word. This intervention failed completely. 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, with or without the aid of asterisks and checks and arrows.