There’s Luo’s study which looked at how good students were at remembering images versus text, and which tried to tease out contributions from the process of note-taking from those having to do with the notes themselves, and overall the conclusion was that pen was best. I had to, appropriately enough, hand-write notes on this topic and review them before writing this, because the few studies that exist on this important academic question-and there are indeed few of them-are conflicting and obsessed with dissecting this question into tiny fragments. So death to the laptop all hail the ballpoint! Right? The final experiment allowed half the students in each group to study their notes for ten minutes, and the pen users who had studied were the clear winners. When it came to understanding concepts, though, the keyboard group did worse. Two of these experiments did not allow the students to review their notes (a situation that does not reflect midterms and finals) and both “pen” and “keyboard” groups did equally well on questions pertaining to facts.
Computer note taking software series#
It’s a series of three experiments involving university students watching short lectures or TED Talks and being quizzed about them almost immediately after. The study I mentioned at the top-literally called “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard” -is really interesting. This sounds like a boon for comprehension… but it requires more brain energy, which may mean important details spoken by the professor end up ignored while the brain wrestles with the information. With regards to the pen, its relative slowness means the student often has to decide on the spot what’s important and what’s not, and how best to rephrase the information and organize it. A Word document is also a poor medium for information that goes beyond sentences, like charts and graphics. But computers are host to a number of distractions in class, including alerts, YouTube, and social media. Humans on average type faster than we write with a pen, which allows for the recording of more information, even verbatim transcripts.
The answer is not intuitively obvious, as there are both advantages and disadvantages to each method. The product is important while the process of note-taking may or may not be.īut what does the scientific literature have to say about the best way to take notes in class? We have so many more options available to us since my parents’ generation, like laptops, tablets, smartphones, and apps designed for note-taking. What is clear however is that the product (the notes) does boost academic achievement substantially, even if the notes were borrowed from someone else and not written by the student being tested. The process of noting something down could itself be beneficial, although the evidence on this is mixed. Why is that? Scientists have narrowed it down to two possible answers. Note-taking and note-reviewing have a substantive benefit on student performance. Studies are all flawed in slightly different ways-their sample size, their data analysis, even how closely they attempt to echo reality in a laboratory setting-but analyzed together, these studies can give us a meaningful answer as we account for their unique flaws. It bears repeating that a single study is almost always never enough.
Is the pen really mightier than the keyboard? I know a professor who begins each semester by pointing out that, according to this one study, students perform better on tests when their notes were taken by hand rather than on a computer.