Taking notes by hand may be better than taking notes on a laptop for remembering conceptual information over the long term, according to a recent study.
In a study examining how effective laptops are for students who diligently take notes, researchers found that they electronic devices may be hurting academic performance.
"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," Pam Mueller, lead author of the study and psychological scientist at Princeton University, said in a statement.
For the study, researchers recruited 65 college students to watch one of the 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 study participants then completed three distractor tasks, including a taxing working memory task. A full 30 minutes later, they had to answer factual-recall questions (e.g., "Approximately how many years ago did the Indus civilization exist?") and conceptual-application questions (e.g., "How do Japan and Sweden differ in their approaches to equality within their societies?") based on the lecture they had watched.
Researchers found 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.
Researchers said 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. This suggests that the benefit of having more content is canceled out by "mindless transcription."
The findings were recently published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
