Technology is a wonderful thing. It let’s us do things quicker, access videos or documents on just about any topic and chat to people on the other side of the world. Life, however, is a series of tradeoffs. There is always something lost when we replace it with technology. Sometimes we welcome these losses. No one’s complaining that we no longer have to flick through a whole phone book to find someone’s number. Sometimes though, the tradeoffs are not so obvious, and sometimes what we lose, is exactly what we should be striving to keep.
If you’re a student you’ve probably considered whether you should handwrite or type your notes. Or maybe you haven’t, maybe you just do what everyone else does, whatever that may be. Either way, there are certainly benefits and detriments to each approach. However, handwritten note-taking is the superior of the two.
What’s important when note taking
Before making claims about something’s value, it’s important to consider what we should value. When note taking there are 3 ways we should value it.
- Understanding of material
- Ability to recall facts
- Completeness
So what does the research say about note-taking on these 3 dimensions?
Understanding
Understanding of lecture material is greater when notes are handwritten than when they are typed. Ironically, it’s because handwriting notes is more difficult. You are forced to take a more active role in your note taking when doing so by hand. You cannot write as fast as you can type. Thus, you are forced to summarise what’s being said rather than keep up, typing everything verbatim. The enhanced understanding comes primarily from the second. As you listen and look, taking in the information of a lecture, you are processing, asking yourself “what can I leave out? what’s important? what’s not?” Just fyi: this filtration process is called encoding.
Recalling facts
When it comes to recalling facts both students performed equally well. This is because memorisation and learning are two separate things. There is no reason encoding should affect memory. Both sets would either have taken down the fact or not.
Completeness
There is no doubt that the completeness trophy goes to typed note-taking. Too bad the trophy isn’t very valuable. Surely the extra, more accurate notes fair better a few weeks after the lecture, right? Nope. Even after students were given a chance to review their notes, the hand-writers performed better. Possibly because of something of an egocentricity bias. Handwritten notes are more personal, we value them more and therefore retain information from them better.
I would add search as a sub-category of completeness. Typed notes are far easier to search than handwritten notes. Just as handwriting being more difficult to do quickly became it’s advantage, handwriting’s inability to be easily acts as another indirect advantage. You are forced to organise your notes better when handwriting. If you’re more organised with your notes from the start you can more clearly see the connections between topics and therefore increase your wholistic understanding.
Distraction
This one doesn’t have to do directly with note-taking, but about the equipment used. It does, however, have a greater impact than any of the others. If you’re distracted, it doesn’t matter what method of notes you take, you aren’t taking them. You aren’t even taking mental notes. For this criterion it’s obvious that the computer is more distracting than the pen and paper. What’s not obvious is how distracting a computer is for those not using it. Sitting behind someone whose scrolling through facebook is almost as bad as doing it yourself. So don’t be that selfish asshole using a laptop.
Well being
While I’m well aware of the conflict of interest in this article, anecdotally, I do feel better for handwriting than I do for typing. It’s a shame I can’t post handwritten notes here for you to read, but a) you need to be able to read it and b) google’s crawlers need to be able to read it. One day, perhaps? Anyway, just try handwriting lecture notes or, if that’s too stressful for you because you don’t believe anything I’ve written so far, handwrite notes to self, rather than taking it down in your phone or on your computer.
There is no reason you should be taking your laptop into lectures now… but of course, there are obvious exceptions. If you’re taking a computing class you may want to run some snippets of code as it happens. Though, as a computer science major myself, I’ve found that this can wait. Focus on the lecture content, focus on the “why” things are happening as they do. Later on you can experiment with the “what”s and “how”s on your computer. If only because you end up getting distracted.
Some sources:
https://www.npr.org/2016/04/17/474525392/attention-students-put-your-laptops-away
