I am in the middle of my 25th
year of teaching at universities. There
have been several changes in the way students approach their classes in that
time. The most noticeable is that when I
started teaching, students took notes in notebooks, but now almost every desk
has a laptop on it when I give a lecture.
There seem to be a lot of obvious
benefits to taking notes on a computer.
For one, it is easy to save the notes in a place where you can find them
later. For another, you will be able to
read your notes later. My own handwriting
is terrible, so it is nice to have a tool that will allow me to read my notes
later.
Before we go out and encourage
every student to bring a laptop to class, though, it is worth checking out a
study by Pam Mueller and Danny Oppenheimer in the June, 2014 issue of Psychological Science.
They compared college students’
performance on tests following exposure to material. The students were assigned either to take
notes longhand or using a laptop. In
these studies, the laptops were set up so that students could only take notes
on them. Of course, in the real world
laptops can provide a variety of distractions.
In the first study, students
watched a TED talk. (For those of you
who have been living under a rock, TED talks are lectures on a variety of
topics that last about 15 minutes.) They
took notes during the talk. Then, they
engaged in other activities for about 30 minutes. Finally, they were given a quiz about the
lecture. The quiz contained both factual
questions and conceptual questions that required some understanding of the
subject matter.
Students did about equally well
on the factual questions regardless of how they took notes. However, the students did much better on the
conceptual questions when they took notes longhand than when they took them
using the laptop.
The experimenters compared the
content of people’s notes to the transcript of the lecture the student
heard. When people typed their notes on
a laptop, they were much more likely to copy what people said directly rather
than writing their impressions of it.
That is, people writing out their notes had to think more deeply about
the content of what they heard than those people who were just typing.
The experimenters expanded on
this finding in two other studies. In
one study, they instructed people using the laptops to take good notes rather
than just transcribing what they heard.
Even when people were given these instructions, they still had a greater
tendency to type what they heard than people who were taking notes
longhand. As before, the people who used
the laptops did more poorly on a test of conceptual knowledge than those who
took notes by hand.
In a third study, students were
tested one week after hearing the initial lecture. In this study, students had a chance to read
over their notes before taking the test.
The idea was that if students took really detailed notes on the laptop,
then perhaps those notes would be more valuable a week after the lecture than they
were immediately afterward.
In this study, participants who
reviewed their notes still did better if they took notes longhand than if they
took notes on the laptop. Interestingly,
in this study, the students did equally poorly regardless of the type of notes
they took if they were not able to study their notes before taking the test.
Putting all of this together, it
suggests that there is real value in having to think about the material in the
process of taking notes. It is because
handwriting is slow and effortful that people have to think more clearly about
what they want to write down rather than copying down what is being said by
rote. In addition, there is real value
to studying later. Just taking good
notes is not enough to be able to remember the information later. It is also important to go back over your
notes and make sure that you think about the information again after being
exposed to it the first time.
