Take Notes by Hand for Better Long-Term Comprehension
- The results revealed 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 benefit of having more content is canceled out by “mindless transcription.”
- The amount of verbatim overlap was associated with worse performance on conceptual items.
What You Miss When You Take Notes on Your Laptop
- Mueller and Oppenheimer predicted that the decrease in retention appeared to be due to “verbatim transcription.”
- And again, though the laptop note takers recorded a larger amount of notes, the longhand note takers performed better on conceptual, and this time factual, questions.
A Learning Secret: Don’t Take Notes with a Laptop
- Students who used longhand remembered more and had a deeper understanding of the material