Mueller researches questions of law and morality, and Oppenheimer tends to focus on decision-making and the psychology of democracy.īut the two say they've appreciated their foray into note-taking research, which stemmed from a real-life problem. (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. Incidentally, the two researchers might look at tablet use next. “Tablets might be the best of both worlds-you have to choose what to write down, but then you have the electronic copy.” “I don’t think we’re gonna get more people to go back to notebooks necessarily,” Mueller said. That initial selectivity leads to long-term comprehension.
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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. “The people who were taking notes on the laptops don’t have to be judicious in what they write down.” “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. And you can’t successfully warn someone to keep them from taking verbatim notes if they’re using a laptop. In other words, taking notes on a laptop seems to lead to verbatim notes, which make it tough to study well. What’s more, if someone took verbatim notes on their laptop, then studying seemed more likely to hinder their performance on the quiz. Longhand-notetakers of any sort, in fact, did better on the quiz than laptop-notetakers. In this last group, longhand-notetakers who had time to study outperformed everyone else. Some of these students were allowed to study their notes for 10 minutes before taking the quiz.
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The final group of students took the quiz a full week after watching a recorded lecture. 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 quiz showed that longhand-notetakers still remembered lecture content better than laptop-notetakers. Take notes in your own words and don’t just write down word-for-word what the speaker is saying. Please try not to do this as you take notes today. 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. Before the laptop-users watched the lecture or took any notes on it, the study administrator told some of them: So students in the second group were given a warning. 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. Analysis of student notes showed that laptop-notetakers tended to transcribe a lot of the speaker’s words verbatim.
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In this group, longhand-notetakers outperformed laptop-notetakers on the quiz. Students watched the video, completed difficult mental tasks for 30 minutes, then took a quiz on the content. 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. 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. Educators still debate whether to allow students to bring their laptops into the classroom. The study comes at a ripe time for questions about laptop use in class. For some tasks, it seems, handwriting’s just better. Even if you warn laptop-notetakers ahead of time, it doesn't make a difference. What's more, knowing how and why typed notes can be bad doesn't seem to improve their quality.