Then taking notes on a laptop can work just fine.Ī more passive way still of keeping track of information from lectures is to record them so you can listen again or re-watch them later. The exception is with learning simple facts. Even if you never refer back to your notes again, the process of creating them can be useful. The reason is that cognitively processing material more deeply while you listen, helps you both to understand it and to remember it later on. When the students were allowed to revise from their notes before being tested a week later, the pen-and-paper group still did better. Despite the warning, when the notes were analysed, the laptop-using students still took more verbatim notes and still couldn’t answer the conceptual questions as well as the people taking longhand notes.īut surely in the long run if your notes are more complete this will help when it comes to revision? Maybe not. So next they did a similar study, but this time the students were cautioned against taking verbatim notes. The team wondered whether it wasn’t the use of a laptop that was the problem, but the fact that the students took verbatim notes. The other advantage of using a pen and paper is that you can move around the page very quickly, circling, underlining or adding extra information in the margins. But when using a pen and paper you process the information more deeply because you can’t possibly write it all down. You can even do it without thinking about the content at all should you choose to. Verbatim note-taking involves a shallower form of cognitive processing. When it came to remembering facts, it didn’t matter which method of note-taking they used, but when asked to explain the concepts covered in the lecture, the students who took notes by hand did better.
Six reasons your memory is stranger than you think.An effortless way to improve your memory.Afterwards the students were given some tricky intelligence tests to distract them, and were then quizzed on the content of the lecture. The students using a keyboard were more likely to type the lecturers’ words verbatim, while the students writing more slowly by hand had no choice but to engage with the information in order to allow them to summarise. You might expect little difference in the notes, since students are so used to using a keyboard these days. Half were given laptops and half took notes with a pen and paper.
In an experiment, run by Pam Mueller at Princeton University published in 2014, students were given Ted talks to watch and were told to take notes. This is a hugely useful skill of course and allows you to take copious notes, quickly and easily, which must surely be a good thing, right? These days many people can type faster than they can write by hand, particularly if they’ve grown up using laptops.
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