Technology is becoming more and more common in lecture theatres, colleges and classrooms worldwide.
And not just for the teachers!
Because laptops, tablets and smart phones are becoming smaller, lighter, more powerful, the idea of taking notes by hand just seems tedious and out dated to many students today.
Typing your notes may be faster and means you can record more when there's a lot of information to take down.
But it turns out there are still advantages to doing things the old-fashioned way.
The research clearly shows that laptops, tablets and other devices can cause distractions. In just 1 click you can check steemit, insta, twitter or Facebook - feels so much better than vegging out in that dull and boring lecture!
And one study has shown that because taking hand written notes means you go slower it's what actually makes it more useful in the long run.
The publication called Psychological Science, has published a study by Pam A. Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the University of California, Los Angeles. In the study they test how hand written note-taking compares to notes taken on a computer and what is the affect on your learning.
"When people type their notes, they have this tendency to try to take verbatim notes and write down as much of the lecture as they can," Mueller tells NPR's Rachel Martin. "The students who were taking longhand notes in our studies were forced to be more selective — because you can't write as fast as you can type. And that extra processing of the material that they were doing benefited them."
Note-taking is categorised in two ways: generative and nongenerative.
- Generative note-taking = condensing, summarising, paraphrasing and concept mapping/mind mapping
- Nongenerative note-taking = copying the content verbatim.
And they also hypothesise two key benefits and why hand written note-taking is beneficial in the first place.
- The encoding hypothesis, when you are taking hand written notes you are using multiple processes, writing, drawing, mapping, spacial design "the processing that occurs" improves "learning and retention."
- The external-storage hypothesis, is that you learn by being able to look back at your notes, or even the notes of other people.
Now I know that if you can type faster than you write, then using a laptop will make you more likely to try to transcribe everything you're hearing. So Mueller and Oppenheimer had to consider whether the benefits of being able to look at your more complete, transcribed notes on a laptop outweigh the drawbacks of not processing that information. On the other hand, when writing longhand, you process the information better but may have less to look back at.
In come the standard Guinea Pigs - university students. For the first study, the guinea pigs were shown a variety of TED talks, and found that the students who used laptops did type significantly more words than those who took notes by hand.
The testing of the encoding hypothesis i.e. how well they remembered information, revealed a key point of divergence, and that was the type of question...
When asked to simply remember facts, like dates, both groups did equally well.
But
For "conceptual-application" questions, such as, "How do Japan and Sweden differ in their approaches to equality within their societies?" the laptop users did "significantly worse."
The same results occurred in a second study, students using laptops were specifically told to avoid taking verbatim notes. "Even when we told people they shouldn't be taking these verbatim notes, they were not able to overcome that instinct," Mueller says. And the correlation was definite and clear - The more words the students copied verbatim, the worse they performed on recall tests.
And to test the external-storage hypothesis, for the third study they gave students the opportunity to review their notes in between the lecture and test. The thinking is, if students have time to study their notes from their laptops, the fact that they typed more extensive notes than their longhand-writing peers could possibly help them perform better.
BUT the students taking notes by hand still performed better. "This is suggestive evidence that longhand notes may have superior external storage as well as superior encoding functions," Mueller and Oppenheimer write.
Do studies like these make any difference to you? Do they mean as a wise student you will go back to pen and paper?
"I think it is a hard sell to get people to go back to pen and paper," Mueller says. "But they are developing lots of technologies now like Livescribe and various stylus and tablet technologies that are getting better and better. And I think that will be sort of an easier sell to college students and people of that generation."
