Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking

Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking
pss.sagepub.com

> The studies we report here show that laptop use can negatively affect performance on educational assessments, even—or perhaps especially—when the computer is used for its intended function of easier note taking.

Out of my hat, I tend to think that digital tools aren't good for learning, for they are too symbolic. I believe native interactions stimulate the brain more and feed more data to process that is useful for newcomers.

Occasionally we'd have lecturers who handed out dense powerpoint slides and then went through and explained them very rapidly. Good luck doing that on a laptop.

I think perhaps 3 out of 80 people used laptops. I usually wrote everything verbatim with a bit of extra stuff the lecturer was saying if something wasn't immediately obvious.

I'd then go through and convert it all to LaTeX forcing myself to understand each equation that went in (i.e. if there was a step with an integral that was omitted in the lecture, perform it). That way you know exactly how to do all the steps and you can add your own relevant comments that you may have glossed over in the auditorium. Worked well for me and I could then recycle the reams of paper that collected on my shelves.

As for distraction, we played Peggle a lot in quantum mechanics...

I've seen undergrad classes where the students get the notes and I saw two main problems. They often either don't bother coming to class or they don't pay attention. In some of my grad courses, we got notes ahead of time and then made personal notes during the lectures on top of the supplied ones, but we were a bit more motivated than the average undergrad.

An alternative that seemed to work well in the undergrad courses I had was notes that had portions for students to fill in. The only problem with this approach is that it requires careful consideration by the lecturer. This approach is actually what is suggested by some of the research [1] on note-taking and lectures.

While the research is mixed on note-taking, overall it seems to suggest that some note-taking is good as long as the lectures are set to accommodate it. For example, looking at a study by Kiewra and Benton [2] it says the "amount of note-taking is related to academic achievement" and "ability to hold and manipulate propositional knowledge in working memory is related to the number of words, complex propositions, and main ideas recorded in notes."

[1] McAndrew, Donald A. "Underlining and notetaking: Some suggestions from research," Journal of Reading, 27(2), November 1983, pp. 103-108.

[2] Kiewra, Kenneth A., and Benton, Stephen L. "The relationship between information-processing ability and notetaking," Contemporary Educational Psychology, 13, 1988, pp. 33-44.