The pen is mightier than the keyboard
www.rd.com
The secrets of straight-A students include setting priorities, staying organised, and taking good notes. And when it comes to taking notes, the pen is mightier than the keyboard, according to scientists.
In a widely-cited article published in Psychological Science, Pam A Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel M Oppenheimer of UCLA revealed that in three separate studies they conducted, taking notes by hand led to better learning than tapping it out on a laptop. In each case, students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who had taken notes longhand.
When people type their notes, they have this tendency to try to take verbatim notes and write down as much of the lecture as they can, Mueller said. But when students take notes by hand, theyre forced to be more selective since no one can write as fast as they type.
Turns out that the extra processing of the material, which was required in order to curate which material to write down, was helpful. Whereas taking more notes can be beneficial, Mueller and Oppenheimer wrote in their article, the tendency to transcribe the entirety of lectures without processing and reframing the information proved detrimental to learning.
Mueller and Oppenheimer noted many other researchers have suggested that laptop note-taking is less effective than longhand note taking for learning, but prior studies had focused primarily on students capacity for multitasking and distraction when using laptops. A recent study out of Michigan State University confirms these prior studies and goes so far as to suggest that students who bring laptops into the classroom tend to end up with poorer grades for the class. This study, which was also published in Psychological Science found that:
Internet use was common among students who brought laptops to class
Internet use wasnt beneficial to classroom performance even when it was class-related
Internet use was downright detrimental to classroom performance when it was non-academic related
The results were consistent even after the researchers accounted for the students individual levels of motivation, intelligence, and interest in the subject matter. In other words, the Internet proved to be an equal-opportunity distraction among all students.
This may not be music to the ears of the parents whose kids have just left for college, laptops in hand. However, if youre one of those parents, and youre worried youve just sent your child off to school with the electronic tool of his academic failure, all is not lost. Talk to your college kid about what to aim for when taking notes in class, and remind him or her not to spend their classroom time on Facebook.
