A Learning Secret: Don’t Take Notes
with a Laptop www.scientificamerica.com
By Cindi May on
June 3, 2014
Students who used longhand
remembered more and had a deeper understanding of the material
The
old fashioned way works better. Credit: Credit: Szepy via
iStock
“More
is better.” From the number of gigs in a cellular data plan to the
horsepower in a pickup truck, this mantra is ubiquitous in American
culture. When it comes to college students, the belief that more is
better may underlie their widely-held
view that laptops in the classroom enhance their academic
performance. Laptops do in fact allow students to do more, like engage in
online activities and demonstrations, collaborate more easily on papers and
projects, access information from the internet, and take more notes.
Indeed, because students can type significantly faster than they can write,
those who use laptops in the classroom tend to take more notes than those who write out their notes by
hand. Moreover, when students take notes using laptops they tend to take
notes verbatim, writing down every last word uttered by their professor.
Obviously
it is advantageous to draft more complete notes that precisely capture the
course content and allow for a verbatim review of the material at a later
date. Only it isn’t. New research by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer
demonstrates that students who write out their notes on paper actually learn
more. Across three experiments, Mueller and Oppenheimer had students take
notes in a classroom setting and then tested students on their memory for
factual detail, their conceptual understanding of the material, and their
ability to synthesize and generalize the information. Half of the
students were instructed to take notes with a laptop, and the other half were
instructed to write the notes out by hand. As in other studies, students
who used laptops took more notes. In each study, however, those who wrote
out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more
successful in applying and integrating the material than those who used took
notes with their laptops.
What
drives this paradoxical finding? Mueller and Oppenheimer postulate that
taking notes by hand requires different types of cognitive processing than taking notes on a
laptop, and these different processes have consequences for learning.
Writing by hand is slower and more cumbersome than typing, and students cannot
possibly write down every word in a lecture. Instead, they listen,
digest, and summarize so that they can succinctly capture the essence of the
information. Thus, taking notes by hand forces the brain to engage in
some heavy “mental lifting,” and these efforts foster comprehension and
retention. By contrast, when typing students can easily produce a written
record of the lecture without processing its meaning, as faster typing speeds allow
students to transcribe a lecture word for word without devoting much thought to
the content.
To
evaluate this theory, Mueller and Oppenheimer assessed the content of notes
taken by hand versus laptop. Their studies included hundreds of students
from Princeton and UCLA, and the lecture topics ranged from bats, bread, and
algorithms to faith, respiration, and economics. Content analysis of the
notes consistently showed that students who used laptops had more verbatim
transcription of the lecture material than those who wrote notes by hand.
Moreover, high verbatim note content was associated with lower retention of the lecture material. It
appears that students who use laptops can take notes in a fairly mindless, rote
fashion, with little analysis or synthesis by the brain. This kind of
shallow transcription fails to promote a meaningful understanding or
application of the information.
If
the source of the advantage for longhand notes derives from the conceptual
processes they evoke, perhaps instructing laptop users to draft summative
rather than verbatim notes will boost performance. Mueller and
Oppenheimer explored this idea by warning laptop note takers against the
tendency to transcribe information without thinking, and explicitly instructed
them to think about the information and type notes in their own words.
Despite these instructions, students using laptops showed the same level of
verbatim content and were no better in synthesizing material than students who
received no such warning. It is possible these direct instructions to
improve the quality of laptop notes failed because it is so easy to rely on
less demanding, mindless processes when typing.
It’s
important to note that most of the studies that have compared note taking by
hand versus laptop have used immediate memory tests administered very shortly
(typically less than an hour) after the learning session. In real
classroom settings, however, students are often assessed days if not weeks
after learning new material. Thus, although laptop users may not encode
as much during the lecture and thus may be disadvantaged on immediate
assessments, it seems reasonable to expect that the additional information they
record will give them an advantage when reviewing material after a long delay.
Wrong
again. Mueller and Oppenheimer included a study in which participants
were asked to take notes by hand or by laptop, and were told they would be
tested on the material in a week. When participants were given an
opportunity to study with their notes before the final assessment, once again
those who took longhand notes outperformed laptop participants. Because
longhand notes contain students’ own words and handwriting, they may serve as
more effective memory cues by recreating the context (e.g., thought processes,
emotions, conclusions) as well as content (e.g., individual facts) from the
original learning session.
These
findings hold important implications for students who use their laptops to
access lecture outlines and notes that have been posted by professors before
class. Because students can use these posted materials to access lecture
content with a mere click, there is no need to organize, synthesize or
summarize in their own words. Indeed, students may take very minimal
notes or not take notes at all, and may consequently forego the opportunity to
engage in the mental work that supports learning.
Beyond
altering students’ cognitive processes and thereby reducing learning, laptops
pose other threats in the classroom. In the Mueller and Oppenheimer
studies, all laptops were disconnected from the internet, thus eliminating any
disruption from email, instant messaging, surfing, or other online
distractions. In most typical college settings, however, internet access
is available, and evidence suggests that when college students use laptops,
they spend 40% of class
time using applications unrelated to coursework, are more
likely to fall off task, and are less satisfied with their education. In one study with law school students, nearly 90% of laptop
users engaged in online activities unrelated to coursework for at least five
minutes, and roughly 60% were distracted for half the class.
Technology
offers innovative tools that are shaping educational experiences for students,
often in positive and dynamic ways. The research by Mueller and
Oppenheimer serves as a reminder, however, that even when technology allows us
to do more in less time, it does not always foster learning. Learning
involves more than the receipt and the regurgitation of information. If
we want students to synthesize material, draw inferences, see new connections,
evaluate evidence, and apply concepts in novel situations, we need to encourage
the deep, effortful cognitive processes that underlie these abilities.
When it comes to taking notes, students need fewer gigs, more brain power.
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