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5/1/14 To Remember a Lecture Better, Take Notes by Hand - Robinson Meyer - The Atlantic
www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/to-remember-a-lecture-better-take-notes-by-hand/361478/ 1/6
What, Exactly, Is
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ROBINSON MEYER MAY 1 2014, 1:35 PM ET
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Psych 101 was about to start, and Pam Mueller had forgotten her laptop at
home. This meant more than lost Facebook time. A psychology grad student at
Princeton, Mueller was one of the class teaching assistants. It was important she
have good notes on the lecture. Normally she used her laptop to take notes, but,
without it, she’d have to rely on a more traditional approach.
So she put pen to paper—and found something surprising.
Class just seemed better. “I felt like I had gotten so much more out of the lecture
that day,” she said. So she shared the story with Daniel Oppenheimer, the
professor teaching the class.
“‘I had a similar experience in a faculty meeting the other day,’” Mueller
remembers him saying. “And we both sort of had that intuition that there might
be something different about writing stuff down.”
It turns out there is.
A new study—conducted by Mueller and Oppenheimer—finds that people
To Remember a Lecture Better,Take Notes by HandStudents do worse on quizzes when they use keyboards in class.
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5/1/14 To Remember a Lecture Better, Take Notes by Hand - Robinson Meyer - The Atlantic
www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/to-remember-a-lecture-better-take-notes-by-hand/361478/ 2/6
remember lectures better when they’ve taken handwritten notes, rather than
typed ones.
What's more, knowing how and why typed notes can be bad doesn't seem to
improve their quality. Even if you warn laptop-notetakers ahead of time, it
doesn't make a difference. For some tasks, it seems, handwriting’s just better.
The study comes at a ripe time for questions about laptop use in class. Educators
still debate whether to allow students to bring their laptops into the classroom.
And while researchers have found that laptop use during class-time tends to be
distracting—not only do laptop-using students not perform as well academically,
but also they’re less happy with their education—Mueller and Oppenheimer’s
research seems to be the first quantitative attempt to compare laptops
disconnected from the Internet with plain-old pencil and paper.
The study was conducted in three parts. At the beginning of each, students
watched video of a lecture or a TED talk, and took notes on it either longhand or
on laptops.
Students watched the video, completed difficult mental tasks for 30 minutes,
then took a quiz on the content. In this group, longhand-notetakers
outperformed laptop-notetakers on the quiz. Analysis of student notes showed
that laptop-notetakers tended to transcribe a lot of the speaker’s words
verbatim. Mueller and Oppenheimer suspected that this was because those who
typed notes were inclined to transcribe lectures, rather than process them. This
makes sense: If you can type quickly enough, word-for-word transcription is
possible, whereas writing by hand usually rules out capturing every word.
So students in the second group were given a warning. Before the laptop-users
watched the lecture or took any notes on it, the study administrator told some of
them:
People who take class notes on laptops when they expect to be tested on the
material later tend to transcribe what they’re hearing without thinking
about it much. Please try not to do this as you take notes today.
Take notes in your own words and don’t just write down word-for-word
what the speaker is saying.
The warning seemed to have no effect. The quiz showed that longhand-
notetakers still remembered lecture content better than laptop-notetakers. And
analyzing the notes that laptop-using students took, the two authors admit: “The
instruction to not take verbatim notes was completely ineffective at reducing
verbatim content.”
The final group of students took the quiz a full week after watching a recorded
lecture. Some of these students were allowed to study their notes for 10 minutes
before taking the quiz. In this last group, longhand-notetakers who had time to
study outperformed everyone else. Longhand-notetakers of any sort, in fact, did
better on the quiz than laptop-notetakers.
What’s more, if someone took verbatim notes on their laptop, then studying
seemed more likely to hinder their performance on the quiz.
In other words, taking notes on a laptop seems to lead to verbatim notes, which
make it tough to study well. And you can’t successfully warn someone to keep
them from taking verbatim notes if they’re using a laptop.
“We don’t write longhand as fast as we type these days, but people who were
typing just tended to transcribe large parts of lecture content verbatim,” Mueller
told me. “The people who were taking notes on the laptops don’t have to be
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5/1/14 To Remember a Lecture Better, Take Notes by Hand - Robinson Meyer - The Atlantic
www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/to-remember-a-lecture-better-take-notes-by-hand/361478/ 3/6
judicious in what they write down.”
She thinks this might be the key to their findings: Take notes by hand, and you
have to process information as well as write it down. That initial selectivity leads
to long-term comprehension. “I don’t think we’re gonna get more people to go
back to notebooks necessarily,” Mueller said. “Tablets might be the best of both
worlds—you have to choose what to write down, but then you have the electronic
copy.”
Incidentally, the two researchers might look at tablet use next. (They didn’t
include them in this study.) But they have busy scientific dockets outside this
work, as neither of them specialize in educational psychology. Mueller researches
questions of law and morality, and Oppenheimer tends to focus on decision-
making and the psychology of democracy.
But the two say they've appreciated their foray into note-taking research, which
stemmed from a real-life problem. “I think,” Mueller said, “that’s where the best
research comes from, because the questions resonate with other people.”
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ROBINSON MEYER is an associate editor at The Atlantic, where he covers technology.
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