WASHINGTON: Want to perform
better in exams? Dust off those ballpoint pens and college-ruled notebooks! Taking notes by hand is better than
writing them on a laptop for remembering conceptual information over the long
term, a new study has found.
"Our new
findings suggest that even when laptops are used as intended - and not for
buying things on Amazon during class - they may still be harming academic
performance," said Pam Mueller of Princeton
University, lead author of the study.
Mueller and
researcher Daniel Oppenheimer, who is now at the University of California,
Los Angeles (UCLA), conducted a series of studies to investigate whether their
intuitions about laptop and longhand note-taking were true.
In the first study, 65 college
students watched one of five
TED Talks covering topics that were interesting but not common knowledge.
The students, who watched the talks in small groups, were either
given laptops (disconnected from Internet) or notebooks, and were told to use
whatever strategy they normally used to take notes.
The students then completed three distractor tasks, including a
taxing working memory task. A full 30 minutes later, they had to answer
factual-recall questions based on the lecture they had watched.
The results showed that while the two types of note-takers
performed equally well on questions that involved recalling facts, laptop
note-takers performed significantly worse on the conceptual questions.
The notes from laptop users contained more words and more
verbatim overlap with the lecture, compared to the notes that were written by
hand.
Overall, students who took more notes performed better, but so
did those who had less verbatim overlap, suggesting that the benefit of having
more content is cancelled out by "mindless transcription."
"It may be that longhand note takers engage in more
processing than laptop note takers, thus selecting more important information
to include in their notes, which enables them to study this content more
efficiently," researchers said.
Surprisingly, the researchers saw similar results even when they
explicitly instructed the students to avoid taking verbatim notes, suggesting
that the urge to do so when typing is hard to overcome.
Researchers also found that longhand note takers still beat
laptop note takers on recall one week later when participants were given a
chance to review their notes before taking the recall test.
Once again, the amount of
verbatim overlap was associated with worse performance on conceptual items.
The findings are published in
the journal Psychological Science. SAR AKJ SAR
