To Remember a Lecture Better, Take
Notes by Hand
Students do worse on quizzes when they use
keyboards in class.
MAY 1 2014, 1:35 PM
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Psych 101 was about to
start, and Pam Mueller had forgotten her laptop at home. This meant more than
lost Facebook time. A psychology grad student at Princeton, Mueller was one of
the class teaching assistants. It was important she have good notes on the lecture.
Normally she used her laptop to take notes, but, without it, she’d have to rely
on a more traditional approach.
So she put pen to paper—and
found something surprising.
Class just seemed better. “I
felt like I had gotten so much more out of the lecture that day,” she said. So
she shared the story with Daniel
Oppenheimer, the professor teaching the class.
“‘I had a similar
experience in a faculty meeting the other day,’” Mueller remembers him saying.
“And we both sort of had that intuition that there might be something different
about writing stuff down.”
It turns out there is.
A new study—conducted
by Mueller and Oppenheimer—finds that people remember lectures better when
they’ve taken handwritten notes, rather than typed ones.
What's more, knowing how
and why typed notes can be bad doesn't seem to improve their quality. Even if
you warn laptop-notetakers ahead of time, it doesn't make a
difference. For some tasks, it seems, handwriting’s just better.
The study comes at a ripe
time for questions about laptop use in class. Educators still debate whether to
allow students to bring their laptops into the classroom. And while researchers
have found that laptop use during class-time tends to be distracting—not only
do laptop-using students not perform as well academically, but also they’re
less happy with their education—Mueller and Oppenheimer’s research seems to be
the first quantitative attempt to compare laptops disconnected from the
Internet with plain-old pencil and paper.
“The
people who were taking notes on the laptops don’t have to be judicious in what
they write down.”
The study was conducted in
three parts. At the beginning of each, students watched video of a lecture or a
TED talk, and took notes on it either longhand or on laptops.
Students watched the video,
completed difficult mental tasks for 30 minutes, then took a quiz on the
content. In this group, longhand-notetakers outperformed laptop-notetakers on
the quiz. Analysis of student notes showed that laptop-notetakers tended to
transcribe a lot of the speaker’s words verbatim. Mueller and Oppenheimer suspected
that this was because those who typed notes were inclined to transcribe
lectures, rather than process them. This makes sense: If you can type
quickly enough, word-for-word transcription is possible, whereas writing by
hand usually rules out capturing every word.
So students in the second
group were given a warning. Before the laptop-users watched the lecture or took
any notes on it, the study administrator told some of them:
People who
take class notes on laptops when they expect to be tested on the material later
tend to transcribe what they’re hearing without thinking about it much. Please
try not to do this as you take notes today. Take notes in your own
words and don’t just write down word-for-word what the speaker is saying.
The warning seemed to have
no effect. The quiz showed that longhand-notetakers still remembered
lecture content better than laptop-notetakers. And analyzing the notes that
laptop-using students took, the two authors admit: “The instruction to not take
verbatim notes was completely ineffective at reducing verbatim content.”
The final group of students
took the quiz a full week after watching a recorded lecture. Some of these
students were allowed to study their notes for 10 minutes before taking the
quiz. In this last group, longhand-notetakers who had time to study
outperformed everyone else. Longhand-notetakers of any sort, in fact, did
better on the quiz than laptop-notetakers.
What’s more, if someone
took verbatim notes on their laptop, then studying seemed more likely to hinder
their performance on the quiz.
In other words, taking
notes on a laptop seems to lead to verbatim notes, which make it tough to study
well. And you can’t successfully warn someone to keep them from taking verbatim
notes if they’re using a laptop.
“We don’t write longhand as
fast as we type these days, but people who were typing just tended to
transcribe large parts of lecture content verbatim,” Mueller told me. “The
people who were taking notes on the laptops don’t have to be judicious in what
they write down.”
She thinks this might be
the key to their findings: Take notes by hand, and you have to process
information as well as write it down. That initial selectivity leads to
long-term comprehension.
“I don’t think we’re gonna
get more people to go back to notebooks necessarily,” Mueller said. “Tablets
might be the best of both worlds—you have to choose what to write down, but
then you have the electronic copy.”
Incidentally, the two
researchers might look at tablet use next. (They didn’t include them in this
study.) But they have busy scientific dockets outside this work, as neither of
them specialize in educational psychology. Mueller researches questions of law
and morality, and Oppenheimer tends to focus on decision-making and the
psychology of democracy.
But the two say they've
appreciated their foray into note-taking research, which stemmed from a
real-life problem. “I think,” Mueller said, “that’s where the best research
comes from, because the questions resonate with other people.”
via Shaunacy Ferro
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