Take note! Pen and paper trump laptop learning, study finds

Much like physical education classes, heartbreak, cramming, and that one professor who’ll haunt your nightmares for the rest of your life, note-taking is and will always be an integral part of school life. After all, students can’t be expected to instantly absorb and remember everything that the teacher says; in order to learn better, it pays to have something to read (or completely ignore until about half an hour before the finals).

 

Of course, modern society holds convenience and efficiency in very high regard, so it’s not surprising to see many students taking down notes using their laptops (or even their smartphones). Who can blame them? It’s neat, clean, efficient, and much easier on your hands and wrists. Besides, you’d be less likely to say that you forgot your notes if they’re stored inside something you would never dare to leave unguarded for even just three seconds. If you can use your laptop to completely obliterate alien armies or your smartphone to throw fat birds at disembodied pigs' heads, then writing things electronically should be a breeze.

 

Unfortunately, efficiency and effectiveness are not quite the same.

 

The write way to take down notes

 

“Typing is faster than longhand, producing more legible and more thorough notes for study later on,” wrote Wray Herbert in an article published on the Association for Psychological Science’s website.

 

However, Herbert mentioned a couple of experiments conducted by Pam Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel Oppenheimer of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), a pair of psychological scientists who were interesting in comparing how students who use conventional means of note-taking (i.e. pen and paper) perform compared to more technologically-inclined students who use their laptops to type lecture notes.

 

The first experiment involved assigning groups of students to particular classrooms. Some students were provided with laptops for note-taking, while others were told to write down their lecture notes on pieces of paper. About half an hour after listening to the exact same lecture, the students were given an exam to gauge how much they were able to memorize (factual recall) and understand (conceptual learning).

 

Amazingly, despite the fact that the students who used laptops had more complete (and even verbatim) notes, the students who took down notes the old-fashioned way performed better, especially in the questions that required reasoning and ideas to answer properly.

 

The researchers then repeated the experiment, except this time, the students were all given sufficient time to study before the exam – an entire week, to be exact. Surprisingly, the students who manually wrote down their notes got higher scores in both factual questions and conceptual questions than the students who relied on their laptops for note-taking.

 

A mechanical process, literally and figuratively

 

The solution seems to be simple: Why not pay more attention to the lecturer while taking down notes, and focus on understanding instead of recording everything word-for-word?

 

Unfortunately, the researchers also discovered that the ability to consciously avoid typing everything verbatim may not be as easy to turn off as a laptop.

 

Even after being given direct instructions to not transcribe the lectures word-for-word, the students who used laptops still ended up trying their best to type their notes exactly the way they heard them.

 

As Herbert observed, “Apparently there is something about typing that leads to mindless processing.”

 

The scientists’ findings will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science. — TJD, GMA News