Using Laptop To Take Notes Lowers Grades

Meshach writes "A study in the journal Computers & Education found that students who took notes on a laptop got lower marks then student who took notes the traditional way with pen and paper. The study's author hypothesized that using a laptop leads to multitasking (i.e. surfing the net or checking email), which reduces concentration."

Comments

So basically surfing net while taking notes

[cod3r_]

Is the problem.. Common sense

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[Anonymous Coward]

Back when I was in an undergrad psychology course, the general consensus was that the method used triggered different parts of the brain. There is something fundamentally different from moving your finger to a particular location and pressing a key than actually moving your hand around to create a string of letters and then focusing on what you have just created.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[Huntr]

Exactly. Here's the paper. It says right there that the students who multi-tasked while taking notes did worse and that some of the participants didn't even adhere to the instructions for their group, i.e., they surfed and screwed around when they weren't supposed to. And then did poorly on a quiz. Gee, who saw that coming?

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Even if you subtract this group, chances are that at least some of the remaining group are simply trying to compensate for their inadequate note taking habits and poor organizational skills (which would lower anyone's educational outcome), and that at least some of them are failing at it.

On the other hand, Org Mode.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[Anonymous Coward]

Back when I was in an undergrad psychology course, the general consensus was that the method used triggered different parts of the brain. There is something fundamentally different from moving your finger to a particular location and pressing a key than actually moving your hand around to create a string of letters and then focusing on what you have just created.

Exactly. The act of writing triggers the learning centre of the brain. Additionally, since we rarely write as fast as the teacher/instructor speaks the student is forced to develop their short-term memory which acts as an I/O buffer further leading to improved retention of the information presented in class. Computers are fantastic for organizing notes and assignments, and with the advent of smartpens students get the best of both worlds (manual note taking and electronic organization). I have a fee of problems with smartpens, however. The form-factor of these pens is not the same as the traditional pen making them difficult to hold for an extended period of time. The writing nibs are not as smooth as traditional pens. The special paper should allow for erasure and updating of the written content and only when the student presses the smartpen on a specific icon on the paper page should the electronic impression of the page be created. In fact, smartpencils instead of smartpens would be a much better writing instrument all around.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[firex726]

I was taught that too, it takes more effort and concentration to write then it does to type; as a result you'll retain more information if written then typed.

But this was over a decade ago so could be very outdated.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[nedlohs]

But is our brain that existed before writing actually triggered by writing specifically? Or is that essentially learned behavior from years of schooling that uses writing in learning? The brain predates writing after all.

If people typed notes from day 1 in school would the act of typing "trigger the learning centre of the brain"?

Not that that sounds like a good thing, pen and paper is nice and quiet. And having to copy notes by rewriting them rather than ctrl-C, ctrl-V seems a good thing in itself.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[cod3r_]

Wonder if this study would still be the same if they were actually writing, but using a ipad or something. Digital notes. Or if the results would still be similar because the kicker is the fact that these people tend to wander off on to the interwebs

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[radiumsoup]

read the parent without the word "additionally" in the third sentence; it's the same idea, and probably shouldn't have been characterized quite the way it ended up being.

It triggers the learning center of the brain BECAUSE it forces you to utilize short-term memory and summarize ideas in your own way.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[David_Hart]

Exactly. Here's the paper. It says right there that the students who multi-tasked while taking notes did worse and that some of the participants didn't even adhere to the instructions for their group, i.e., they surfed and screwed around when they weren't supposed to. And then did poorly on a quiz. Gee, who saw that coming?

Why is it that we believe that we can multi-task? In regards to work, humans cannot do true multi-tasking. We are either concentrating on performing one task or are are task switching by concentrating on multiple tasks in much smaller time slices. People are lauded for being multi-taskers, but the end result is that they end up doing more than one thing poorly, as we see in the study results.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_multitasking

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[SecurityGuy]

Hah! Me! I said as much when my uni instituted a mandatory laptop policy in 1997 or 1998.

I do get your sarcasm, it just irritated me when they did it. Just yet another example of not having any concrete ideas of how to improve education, so let's throw technology/money at it, made worse because they weren't even throwing their own money. They just blanket made everyone buy a laptop they specified, whether or not they actually needed it, whether or not it actually improved the educational experience.

And of course, the latest silver bullet is tablets.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[SecurityGuy]

It's actually not a moronic study. It's a necessary study to get people to stop enacting moronic policies. If people didn't do stupid things, we wouldn't have to do studies like this to persuade them to stop.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[ildon]

For many of my easier college classes, I never actually read my notes, but I still took them. The physical act of processing the information and writing it down greatly helped me retain and understand it, even if I didn't go back and read them afterwards.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[Colonel Korn]

Wonder if this study would still be the same if they were actually writing, but using a ipad or something. Digital notes. Or if the results would still be similar because the kicker is the fact that these people tend to wander off on to the interwebs

It would have to be something with an active digitizer, like the Surface Pro, to allow comfortable handwritten notes. Even if you wear a gloves to fix the palm issue, iPad note taking with a capacitive stylus is pretty clunky and inaccurate.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[Notabadguy]

I don't think multi-tasking is the right conclusion to make here.

The human brain can process ~450 words per minute.
The human mouth speaks at ~60 words per minute.
If you've ever watched or participated in collegiate debate, that is why most debaters speak so quickly; people can process input faster than others can verbally output.

I can write 15-25 words per minute.
I can type 90-105 words per minute.

If you're talking to me, and I'm taking notes via penmanship, I need to carefully listen and process everything you say in order to pick and choose words to write that will convey the meaning of your message. I can't write as fast as you can talk. When I type, I can word for word record every syllable of our conversation, at conversational or lecture speed.

One of these activities requires listening, comprehension, simplification, translation and reference recording notes.
One of these activities requires listening and muscle memory.

Which activity does common sense suggests leaves more of an impact in my short term or long term memory?

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[Digicrat]

It all depends on the student, and the class. In my undergrad days, I took notes exclusively on the computer (once I got it sophomore year). In some classes, I would be typing full speed and able to get down everything the professor said nearly word for word. Of course, not only did I type 90+ WPM in those days, but my handwriting has always been such that if I take notes by hand I always have trouble reading it later...

In other classes (mostly basic CS classes), I would type out what they wrote out on the board, or the important things they said, and then spend >90% of the class reading Yahoo! News. Those were the classes that I had both the best notes of the class, and the best grades. Of course, if it wasn't for Yahoo News!, I would have slept/dosed-off through the 10% of lecture that actually contained new and useful information . . .

Now, taking notes on the PC in Math/Science classes where it's difficult to type formulas is a whole other game ... and those were the cases I always reverted to pen and paper.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[Dcnjoe60]

Back when I was in an undergrad psychology course, the general consensus was that the method used triggered different parts of the brain. There is something fundamentally different from moving your finger to a particular location and pressing a key than actually moving your hand around to create a string of letters and then focusing on what you have just created.

There has since been additional research using functional MRI (FMRI) that shows different parts of the brain are accessed when something as basic as reading is measured when using a book versus a computer/tablet screen. With the computer/tablet screen it lights up the same areas as watching TV which is different from reading from paper sources (both also light up the speech centers, etc, to actually process what is being read).

The researchers pointed out that it was too early to tell whether this was good or bad from an educational perspective as the wide spread use of electronic devices is still relatively new. At this point, they simply point out that the brain is processing the information differently. Interestingly, they also compared the FMRI scans of actual pilots while flying pc-based flight simulators versus non-pilots. The non-pilots lit up the same areas as in the reading, watching videos, etc. The actual pilots lit up the different areas. The hypothesis was that the brains, already having a trained response and pattern used that to process the information from the simulator.

Why they found that interesting was that it did not appear the case with something as basic as reading. And even the pilots, when reading, lit up different areas of the brain depending if they were reading words off a page or off a screen, like everybody else. Again I emphasize that the researchers emphasized that the data only showed that different parts of the brain were used to process the information and not that one was better than the other. But it is interesting, none the less.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[Dcnjoe60]

But is our brain that existed before writing actually triggered by writing specifically? Or is that essentially learned behavior from years of schooling that uses writing in learning? The brain predates writing after all.

If people typed notes from day 1 in school would the act of typing "trigger the learning centre of the brain"?

Not that that sounds like a good thing, pen and paper is nice and quiet. And having to copy notes by rewriting them rather than ctrl-C, ctrl-V seems a good thing in itself.

Probably not for the same reason that the learning centers in the brain are triggered very early in infancy, long before there would be the ability to type anything. Human beings learn how to speak and construct sentences long before formal education. They do so by actually practicing the skill. Human beings learn about spatial relationships long before they have geometry and math. They do so by throwing things, etc. In otherwords, our brains are wired to learn from the five senses and long before we get to formal education or would have the ability to type or write, we have created billions of connections of neuron pathways that reinforce that.

Your last sentence is important, too. To copy your notes, you have to rewrite them. Everytime you do, you are reinforcing what ever it is, because your brain has to process it. Copy and paste doesn't do that. That is why the baby boomers used to have to write spelling words over and over to learn how to spell them or for punishment you had to write some sentence out 100 times. The repetition of writing over and over reinforced whatever the "lesson" was just like practicing free throws does for a basketball player.

Because of the way we type, even for good typists that doesn't happen. We see the letters and words and just repeat them, we don't actually read them. As such, the level of recall, for most people, is very low when compared to having to physically copy something by hand. Again, evolution (or ID for those that subscribe to it) has our brains wired to use as many of the senses as possible to process the world around us.Writing is an extension of our speech and language centers, typing is not, at least when done for notetaking.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[nbritton]

If you're talking to me, and I'm taking notes via penmanship, I need to carefully listen and process everything you say in order to pick and choose words to write that will convey the meaning of your message. I can't write as fast as you can talk. When I type, I can word for word record every syllable of our conversation, at conversational or lecture speed.

Or your professor can stop being a douch and give everyone pre-prepared notes so that the class can dedicate their attention to a single activity. Actually lectures should be video recorded and assimilated on the students own time, class should be for Q & A and group review.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[supercrisp]

I'll have to go read the research paper when I have time, but I suspect it's more than getting distracted. Excessive, slavish note-taking is bad for retention. And, I've noticed that a lot of people who take notes on laptops, myself included, get swept up into just taking dictation instead of writing notes that capture key information. Research I've read on learning backs this up (though a lot of that "research" really earns scare quotes). It might also be that note-taking in a word processor or even something like an outliner discourages two-column or similar note-taking methods in which part of study is commenting on, synthesizing, and prioritizing the material recorded from the lecture.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[Dcnjoe60]

For many of my easier college classes, I never actually read my notes, but I still took them. The physical act of processing the information and writing it down greatly helped me retain and understand it, even if I didn't go back and read them afterwards.

That is the point. To write notes your brain has to process information in certain ways that evolution has adapted us to be very good at and even before our first day of school we have been using. While on the surface, typing notes would seem to be very similar, it is not. Here is a simple test that most people can try. Take a piece of text, say a 500 word newspaper article, that you are unfamiliar with and copy it by hand. 30minutes later write down what you remember. The next day take another similar article but this time type it out. Again, 30 minutes later write down what you remember. If you are like most people, you will remember more details from the first story than the second. Now to be fair, in a true experiment, this wouldn't work, because there needs to be some certainty that the stories are similar and contain similar types of detail and all of that. However, the first time you read the story to see if it is similar, you mess up the study (you would need another person to do the selection to keep it clean). But the point is, by writing things out, we tend to retain more information because of the way our brain processes the information. If you take it to the extreme and write it out multiple times, after three times, on valid stories (where they are similar details, length, etc.) after copying three times, most people will remember 87.5% of the details of the story. With typing it is something like 73%. So repetition definitely helps, but still does not make up for the different neural pathways involved.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[Dcnjoe60]

Why is it that we believe that we can multi-task?

Because we are quite delusional, that's why.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[ccanucs]

I agree it's the act of writing. I use Buzan's iMindMap to prepare 40-min long presentations in the past - and did so using a wacom-enabled pen tablet. I found that the act of writing on the tablet to fill in the mind map stimulated the memorizing process for the talk far better than typing into the boxes. I wasn't distracted by anything else while undertaking this task, rather, fully focused on it. Typing didn't work as well at enabling recall. Writing did.

BTW: It's not the same using just a regular tablet - even with palm rejection - there is a distraction associated with that. Only a proper pen-enabled tablet has the same fluidity of note-taking as pen and paper.

Why not use pen and paper???

Two reasons...

1.) I have a permanent and easily transmissible and alterable record
2.) You should *see* my handwriting!!! :-)

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[PPH]

Right.

I attended a lecture by a psychologist/educator who had done some research linking the mental processes needed to write/draw information as received to those who just listened or read it. Her observation was that there is a significant improvement in comprehension if one goes through the process of recording it manually. Drawing and sketching in particular, in disciplines that lend themselves to graphical methods made significant differences.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[Ardyvee]

I take it walking and talking are not considered two task at once. Unless you mean high-level tasks (ie the ones we are conscious about, not like walking and such).

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[noh8rz10]

But if we get rid of the crackers, what will we have with our cheese?

We'll lose weight on the south beach diet.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[Jhon]

I can type fast. 100+ wpm when I get going. The problem is that I don't need to THINK about it. It comes in my ear or eyes then my fingers move and it 'happens'. I can actually hold a conversation about a completely different topic while I type. Taking notes by pen/paper is different in that I need to process what's being said before it hits my hand (using different parts of the brain, as you say). I actually clarify 'on the fly' or add additional notes to ask questions later.

I work in IT -- and we ALL have note pads when going to meetings or on teleconfs. It just works better. Plus I can draw sketches/flow-charts and get immediate feedback.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[lgw]

But is our brain that existed before writing actually triggered by writing specifically? Or is that essentially learned behavior from years of schooling that uses writing in learning? The brain predates writing after all.

I can only speak for myself. Yes, it's writing specifically. Through most of school, I never took any kind of notes, so no training there. Last couple of years of high school and through college I found that if I hand-wrote notes, I remembered the content - any other method and I didn't. And I often can't actually read my handwritten notes!

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[lgw]

Many things that are "just common sense" are utterly wrong. You'd be amazed the crap people believe, and pass down as "just common sense" for generations.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

Galaxy Note 10.1.

The ultimate tool does not exist though.
that would be a tablet with a fully capable version of OneNote and digitizer not running a Windows operating system > 7.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[DragonTHC]

It's more complex than that. It has more to do with the cognitive skill of writing vs the technical skill of typing. Your brain has a better chance of remember things that are being written than things being typed. There's more time to remember it and the action is more similar to how you're going to do the classwork.

As for the summary of tfa, the study's author did not hypothesize using a laptop leads to multitasking. He speculated it. He hypothesized that using a laptop to take notes results in lower grades on classwork.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[gweihir]

Matches my experience. Hand-written notes on paper are also of better quality. Notes on paper are easily compatible with pictures, graphs, formulas, arrows, colors, etc. while that is very hard to do real-time on a computer. I doubt the "multi-tasking" explanation is on the mark. I have made the same experience when taking notes in talks, when I was definitely not multitasking. I think even when using a good ASCII-only editor, typing on a computer takes too much concentration as opposed to writing on paper.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[bluefoxlucid]

You can add pitbulls being dangerous to the list too. They're more aggressive than Golden Retrievers... in fact, golden retrievers are the only thing less aggressive than pit bulls. Even mistreated pit bulls which have become aggressive re-integrate well and become docile, sociable dogs without much of any particular effort.

Of course, a girl gets mauled by a husky, shows up on page 17 of a local paper. A girl gets mauled by a pit bull, shows up on the front page of 288 national newspapers as "Pit Bull Mauls 3 Year Old Girl To Death!" News isn't interested in it. Then the statistics come, and they use a cross section of news reports because there's no real central reporting agency for animal bites. Then the news reports that pit bulls are the #1 cause of dog attacks based on some study they found... which amounts to a count of articles the news published about pit bull maulings!

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[bluefoxlucid]

I have the perfect teaching tool we should be using as early as first grade!

It's a numerical computer...

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[jason8]

The human mouth speaks at ~60 words per minute.

Yes.......that.......sounds........pretty.........plausible.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[proslack]

Or maybe Pit Bulls are just more dangerous:

As a result of a perceived increase in pit bull injuries, all children who presented to The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia during 1989 for evaluation of dog bite injuries were prospectively studied...Significantly more pit bull injuries (94% vs 43%, P http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/88/1/55.short

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[oh_my_080980980]

Really Potsy? What psychology course was that? Because that has nothing to do with how multitasking or being distracted impairs learning.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[oh_my_080980980]

Please stop. You do not know what you are talking about. You think you do, which is the tragic part.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[oh_my_080980980]

It would because if you RTFA, the point was about being DISTRACTED! Not his asinine notion that you learn better writing instead of typing. Morons are out in force today.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[oh_my_080980980]

As opposed to someone listening and paying attention to the lecture. Writing it down did nothing for you. It was the part about you paying attention.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[oh_my_080980980]

Actually it doesn't tell you what the brain is doing. It just shows you areas of the brain that are active and inactive.

A little knowledge and people think they're neuroscientists .

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[oh_my_080980980]

You doubt. That rich. Publish a paper then talk to me. It's the distraction moron. Hand writing notes DOES ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. It is know different than typing notes. The point is to actively process the information. How you record it, hand writing or typing, does not matter.

Good god a couple idiots take psych 101 courses and they think they understand cognition!

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[losfromla]

I think you are right about the pit bulls having excellent demeanor and being generally docile. Here is the problem, they are extremely strong and have tremendous jaw strength, thus on the rare occasion that they go bad on a kid (and sometimes adult), well that kid dies. A mean little chihuahua on the other hand goes berserk on a (non-infant) kid and well, you might have to crack open the box of band-aids and a lolly to make the child feel better. That is why if we get a dog, the rule will be that the dog can be no heavier than 25% of the weight of the smallest member of the household. I figure that should be safe enough in most cases.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[ildon]

For any content difficult enough to require that much attention (meaning more than just rote memorization), I'd have to do that anyway, so I don't really see that as a loss.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[ildon]

No, because I've specifically tried that, and for memorization tasks it just isn't as effective. Especially in very large classes where directly engaging the professor can be difficult.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[tibit]

There's an easy solution for that. Just write your notes down on Surface Pro. As much as I adore Apple hardware, Surface Pro is about the only PC that I'm willing to put up with. I'm kinda sad in fact that it's not an Apple product. It's fucking fantastic for note taking and drawing. There's nothing else like it. I mean it. Surface Pro with Autodesks's Sketchbook Pro is pretty much all I'm using for my engineering sketches and diagrams - it has replaced my paper notebook and scratch paper. After a couple of weeks it's quite amazing how cool my notes look, even though I'm not a very artsy person at all.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[ewibble]

I personally found not taking any notes the most productive way of learning in class/lectures, and well just fully listening to the lectures. But that is me and maybe I am a bit strange I am not saying it is better for everyone. I would like to see a study of note taking vs having them handed out.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[tibit]

There's a lot of wisdom in that sentence. Kudos!

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[ppanon]

Which part is he not supposed to know what he's talking about? The neuroscience of learning while writing, or the part about smart pens? Because I've read a number of popularization articles on recent research using MRIs to study brain activity and learning during writing vs typing, which seems to back up what he says in his post (certainly more so than the apparent guesses of the study authors) . Now regarding his opinion on smart pens, that seems perhaps subjective, but then your blank assertion that he doesn't know about his own preferences seems to be "not even wrong".

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[tibit]

I mostly agree. A meeting half-way, for me, would be for students to print out the handout notes, formatted such that there are breaks between paragraphs for you to write your own notes in.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[tibit]

Interesting. I think with LyX open I can keep up with anyone handwriting almost any math, perhaps with a few hours worth of practice if I'm rusty at the moment.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[ppanon]

Except that the researcher seems to not provide any data to back up his assumption (at least none made it into the summary). However there have been recent MRI studies that indicated that writing activates many more regions of the brain than typing. In doing so, it could very well require more focus and stimulate the release of neurotransmitters that facilitate the forming of short and long term memories. MRIs have really opened a lot of new avenues of research and analysis when it comes to neuroplasticity and learning.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[bluefoxlucid]

They don't have more jaw strength than any other dog their size that doesn't have particularly strong/weak jaw strength per mass for the Canus Lupus Familiarus species. Labs bite just as hard and Shepherds are more destructive. Ever wrestled a Rottie?

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[ppanon]

I think that more than the short term memory use, handwriting requires "symbolization". You look up at the blackboard/screen to read a bit, look down at your paper to make sure you are writing correctly in an aligned form and adjust, rinse and repeat. To go into your short term memory, your brain will "symbolize" the words (i.e. activiate the neural regions associated with that word/concept), and in doing so activates many regions of the brains associated with those symbols through established pathways.

That process doesn't need to happen with touch typists who never look at the keyboard. They can just go from letter to letter without significant symbolization activity. That's would explain recent studies reporting that fMRIs show significantly more brain activity during writing than typing.

By forcing symbolization and activating related symbol paths in temporal proximity, neuroplasticity indicates that writing would facilitate/activate the formation of new paths for memorization. A good way to test this would be to repeat those fMRI tests with people who aren't touch typists. By having to look at the keyboard to type they would presumably still have to perform some level of symbolization but perhaps less so than with printing or cursive writing (which also triggers more brain activity for fine motor control and cursive tying between letters), with expected results being somewhere between writing and touch-typing.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[bluefoxlucid]

94% vs 43%?

Ah. You're wrong.

More than 12 different purebreeds or crossbreeds were identified as perpetrators, including German shepherds (n = 35), pit bulls (n = 33), rottweilers (n = 9), and Dobermans (n = 7). Most (54%) animals were contained (ie, leashed, fenced, in-house) at the time of injury. Fewer (46%) were provoked prior to biting. Significantly more pit bull injuries (94% vs 43%, P < .001) were the consequence of unprovoked attacks and involved freely roaming animals (67% vs 41%, P < .01).

So, second-hand reports (from who? The parents?) of "my child wasn't doing anything and that dog wasn't on a leash and it attacked my sweet angel!" say that the attacks were UNPROVOKED.

As for injuries, 35 German Shepherd, 33 Pitbull, 9 Rotties, 7 Dobies. 84 total, 40% pittbullsand 42% Shepherds.

It doesn't specify how severe any of the injuries are. I would point out that German Shepherds will fuck you up. If they don't like you they will fuck you up. Doberman and Rotties aren't nearly as aggressive. Shepherds have a tendency to be more disciplined by nature: they'll take owner cues seriously, and won't attack someone the owner appears to accept. These are the kinds of dogs that can be docile or aggressive--they might let you come in freely, or they might tear you apart if you enter the house alone--but will typically remain docile if you're being escorted by their owner in either case. If you attack someone in front of their GS, you should have a prepared will on file.

Rotties on the other hand tend to specifically defend children. It's unsurprising that there aren't a lot of rottweiler bites reported for children. Most likely those bites are probably nips from the dog trying to control the child--they've been known to go and get a child that's wandering off and drag it back by force, usually without inflicting any damage. Speculation, but you know. There's a really obvious reason your kid is going to get a bite from a rottweiler, and it tends to not be a bad bite. This is different from a German Shepherd deciding it doesn't like you.

In other words, this data isn't very useful. It tells me there were more uncontrolled pitbulls and more bites that parents decided to bring in; when I got bit by dogs my parents didn't take me to the hospital. What it doesn't tell me is anything about total interaction with dogs of various types; severity of bites; or a real explanation of if the dog was being provoked (that data is suspect; it always will be). It doesn't tell me what kind of owners the dogs in question had either, or how the dogs were handled.

This is all important stuff. There's a repeated conjecture that pit bulls seem dangerous because drug dealers get them because they look mean, and then the dogs are abused and beaten and left to roam free and they wind up being aggressive, and so that's the cross-section we get. That's unsubstantiated; but it's an important consideration: is there a confounding here?

I've listed plenty of lurking variables and potential confounding issues for the abstract you linked. Can't see the whole paper.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[ppanon]

True, enough. However we do know which parts of the brain have primary roles in various types of information processing (sensual, spatial, etc.). While there is significant variation between individuals, to a certain rough extent you can also pre-map those locations with fMRIs during various types of stimulation. That's how we've been able to confirm, for instance, that people with a non-functioning sense (eyesight, hearing, etc.) re-purpose the standard brain centre for that sense to process other senses. fMRIs provide a major new tool for the study of the brain, providing rapid objective data on what was previously either painstakingly and slowly collected through the study of individuals with brain damage, or even worse - unsupported conjecture. While the response of fMRIs to brain activity is not instantaneous or temporally fine-grained, it is nonetheless a huge advance for many types of observations.

Would you prefer to go back to a couch, a pad of paper and a pen?

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[ppanon]

fMRIs have also allowed researchers to study neuroplasticity without having to perform tests that involve inflicting brain and neural damage on animals. It's allowed neuroplasticity research to progress faster after being stalled for 20 years by faked PETA propaganda.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[ppanon]

fMRIs show that writing and typing are handled very differently by the brain.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[Livius]

...basically surfing net instead of taking notes...is the problem.

FTFY.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[gweihir]

Thank you, and moron yourself. If you are a psych-researcher, then you just validated my decision to never waste any time in that subject.

Hand writing notes on the same skill level as typing them in may do nothing, but that skill level is basically impossible to reach for typing, unless it is all text and does not require any abstracting or remarks about real-time insights. Not my experience in the classroom, but hen I did not study a subject were a big ego is all that is required.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[ppanon]

Is the problem.. Common sense

and that is a sterling example of why "common sense" is sometimes so superficial as to be wrong.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[kermidge]

No, that's not what the article is about. If it were that, or that was what the matter was, then yes.

The matter is that taking notes by typing them uses different parts of and paths in the brain than writing them with pen or pencil; the latter provides better retention. This is not a new learning, although the study showing it is.

The original research goes back a ways; one result, the bit about writing, was incorporated into Air Force study methods from, IIRC, somewhen late '60s, maybe a bit later. The additional bit, about the contrast 'tween pen and keyboard, has only shown up lately as people began using laptops to take notes and others began to do the studies

A poster below wonders what if people started taking notes via keyboard early on, as used to be done by pen in hand, would the difference disappear. We will find out soon enough with the current crop of digital children. Further there will likely be no difference as using something as old skool or faggy as a pen will disappear. The only real result I foresee is lowered subject matter retention rates. But this is already happening owing to shorter attention spans coupled with difficulty in focusing (they're not quite the same thing, btw.)

Re: So basically surfing net while taking notes

[william.w.crocker]

This assumes short term memory is important. My ability to randomly recall is probably far less important than my ability to apply three information I learn. If faster recording through typing and increased organization leads to a better ability to apply 5 years from now rather than when you take the test 2 weeks from now I'd much prefer that. Also presumably decreases errors in application down the line. If short term memory development which is aided by the decreased I/o rate of handwriting is advantageous for grades that tells me we are testing the wrong way. We're assessing an arbitrary skill which doesn't translate to productivity in almost any field. Actually, that seems entirely plausible. I'm still taking notes on my laptop.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[Reziac]

I'd observed this same thing in school. So I took copious notes, even tho I rarely looked at them again. And while the details of the various subjects have long since fallen out of my head, I still recall the gists.

But another example: I know someone who was repeatedly failing the written driver test. She'd read and reread the manual and she'd still fail the test. So I told her to copy it via longhand, she did so, and lo and behold, she passed the test.

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[RockDoctor]

Through most of school, I never took any kind of notes, so no training there.

And when you were writing out your essays and assignments for your homework? Or did you have a computer and printer at home?

Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes

[Meski]

Hmm, I never took notes. I found that thinking about what the lecturer was saying was better than trying to write down maybe 20% of what they said (ok, more than 20% if you could do Pitmans) - better lecturers might simply issue lecture notes for those that like that. Taking notes is too much like rote learning.

stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

remove Freecell from the laptop first, dumbass.

10 Bucks says

[Anonymous Coward]

10 Bucks says that the manufacturers are so dependent on getting their machines in schools that they simply release locked down and crippled 'student edition' machines.

Re:10 Bucks says

[MickyTheIdiot]

That's a good bet. Plus they won't gauge it right and they'll leave off items that have important dual-usages... like a web browser, chat client, etc...

what about

[rossdee]

what about students that don't take any notes ?

Re:what about

[DogDude]

what about students that don't take any notes ?

What about flying elephants? What about cheese?

Obviously, students that don't take notes wasn't part of this study.

Re:what about

[Anonymous Coward]

What about flying elephants? What about cheese?
Obviously, students that don't take notes wasn't part of this study.

They should have been. When I was in college I rarely took notes, because taking notes is also distracting. It may well be that the act of taking notes itself decreases grades.

As to flying elephants, I doubt any high level Republicans had computers when they were in school. Considering my own Congressman, Rodney Davis, a tea party wacko who believes that global warming ended fifteen years ago and has said so publically, well, he's pretty cheezy but I don't think he even graduated high school. The man is a real moron.

Re:what about

[readin]

I plead Guilty, at least through high school and college. My daily grades were poor, my test scores good and my finals not even a problem. Even today friends and colleagues are impressed by how much I remember from high school and college.

Then I went to grad school where they told me my grades had to be all A's and B's. I decided to buckle down. I took notes. I studied for tests. I did the daily homework. My grades were all A's and B's, but I don't remember anything.

In high school and college I was listening to the lectures for the purpose of learning interesting things. I learned. In grad school I was taking notes during lectures for the purpose of getting good grades. I got good grades, but forgot everything shortly after the tests.

Re:what about

[intermodal]

I would tend to agree with you on note-taking. I found that when I took notes, I generally missed about half the class. My final GPA was something like 3.979, so I feel pretty confident that it worked for me.

Re:what about

[intermodal]

the thing is, for equations and such, I had no need to copy them down in class, since my instructors generally already displayed them via powerpoint, and made the slides available online.

Re:what about

[cod3r_]

more likely to be billionaires than any of the other try hards no doubt.

Re:what about

[NewWorldDan]

And knowledge was passed from the notes of the instructor to the notes of the student without passing through the brain of either.

According to my own research (n=1), the best approach is to read the text before the lecture and use the lecture for further understanding.

Re:what about

[subanark]

My GPA went up when I stopped taking notes (but that also could have been since I was taking higher level classes). Personally, when I did take notes I wasn't able to remember anything in class, and going back to my notes didn't help me much.

I do have a neurological audio processing disorder though that makes it difficult to comprehend spoken words as quickly as most people. Math was pretty much the only subject I excelled at, since Math teachers are pretty good about writing everything important on the board.

Re:what about

[Anonymous Coward]

It may well be that the act of taking notes itself decreases grades.

This has extensively been studied before and consistently people who take notes tend to outperform those who don't. As usual there are exceptions, but as a rule of thumb most people learn more if the copy down at least some facts from the board/slides.

Re:what about

[intermodal]

I actually have a similar issue. It's coupled with a difficulty processing voice in a noisy environment. I would be unsurprised if the two were related.

Re:what about

[subanark]

Probably the same, as that is another one of the issues I have. The realization that it takes me longer to comprehend words than most people was one of the things I learned later in life. If I can predict what is being said I can maintain a 1 on 1 conversation, or at least not pause too long to make it look awkward. If it is in a group, I have difficulty jumping in too add discussion before someone else comments.

Re:what about

[intermodal]

Indeed, I have the same issue. I read quite well, the spoken word however just processes slowly and/or poorly.

Re:what about

[intermodal]

So am I.

Re:what about

[BForrester]

On the other hand, we can look at published academic studies which show that note-taking can be highly effective.

http://www.answers.com/topic/cornell-notes#Studies_on_effectiveness
http://wac.colostate.edu/journal/vol16/boch.pdf

BTW, by taking good notes in college, I learned that one must not rely on anecdotal evidence.

Re:what about

[Araes]

They should have been. When I was in college I rarely took notes, because taking notes is also distracting.

Similar. I generally preferred classes where they provided a notes handout at the end of the class (for those who attend) and just had people listen and interact. For those that didn't, I normally brought my recorder and would just transcribe later (digital or by hand) so that I could just relax, listen, and participate while I was there.

Re:what about

[intermodal]

You may have learned that, but while I learned the same thing, I also learned the related fact that I don't give a damn about using better-than-anecdotal evidence on subjects I don't care about, nor about proving points that aren't important to me to people who passionately care about the other side.

Re:what about

[ppanon]

It depends on whether you have a textbook that covers the same material, or only what is presented in the course. I had a number of courses where there was no textbook. To effectively transfer the information to long-term memory, you need to review, and to review it you need the material stored in some form outside your brain.

I think that we now understand enough about neuroplasticity, memorization, and learning that there should now be a mandatory first year course on optimal note taking and study patterns, with perhaps some testing available where there is some variation in learning style. In fact the latter should probably be systematically done in the first year or two of high school so that you don't have to have every high school teacher re-building that wheel with every new student they get.

Re:what about

[RyoShin]

I'm reminded of my Calc II class back in college: The professor, while perhaps highly intelligent, was also quite scatterbrained. We had the curriculum at the beginning of class, including what problems we were to do for each section. After the first week I learned that I should disregard the lecture completely, as the professor would often forget where he was in a problem and take a few moments to get back on track or go through a long problem, get to the end, go "Huh, that's not the right answer", and then a student would point out that a + in a very early step should be a -; he'd go "Aha!", erase half the chalkboard, and I'd see most of the students furiously scribbling out or erasing notes they were taking. I just sat in the back of the room and read through the book and did problems at my own (faster) pace.

Hardly surprising....

[Anonymous Coward]

I was schooled in the late 1970's/early 1980's - way before the advent of computers in the classroom. We were taught that writing things down (even copying from a book) helped the content to 'sink in' to your memory far better than just reading it and I believe this to be true - even now when I take my own notes I remember the content pretty well.

Cut and paste or typing on a screen knowing you can save it to disc for easy recovery later does nothing for the memory - indeed the whole act is designed to save data to magnetic storage rather than brain cells!

Re:Hardly surprising....

[16Chapel]

YMMV - personally I learnt best by listening to the lecturer and digesting what they're saying (and, even better, asking the odd question). Writing things down doesn't help me remember, and never has - I actually find it distracting.

Re:Hardly surprising....

[91degrees]

This was the basis of my revision technique. Take notes from notes (summarised so that I know which bits I don't understand). Throw away newly written notes. Repeat. When I started a third iteration, I knew it all, and knew I knew it.

Re:Hardly surprising....

[nurb432]

Most likely they were typing the information in. Not copy/paste. This would serve the same purpose as writing, if diligent.

I'm sure however, that at the same time they were screwing around with the computer. No different than writing your notes and at the same time talking to your girlfriend sitting across you, before cellphones and computers.

Re:Hardly surprising....

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Cut and paste or typing on a screen knowing you can save it to disc for easy recovery later does nothing for the memory

I think that even electronic note taking can be hardly reduced to "copy and paste". You still have to filter through the input in your head and come up with a wording that you'll be likely to remember on your own. That still exercises the brain.

Re:Hardly surprising....

[omnichad]

Absolutely. You have muscle memory - the unusual layout of every page of notes can forge a memory too. I took lots of notes in college, never went back and studied them, and I did great.

The laptop was brought to classes I didn't need to learn in. I had a studio sound recording class where the teacher would arrive just in time for class and spend the first 20 minutes of a 50 minute class trying to get their projector connected to their laptop and set up.

Re:Hardly surprising....

[EvilSS]

I have to do this. I don't know if it's a neurological quirk or what, but if I really want to learn something I "read it, say it, write it, repeat". Just reading it or listening to the lecturer doesn't work for me. Even with a subject I find interesting, I just can't retain it otherwise.

Re:Hardly surprising....

[omnichad]

That absolutely depends on if your class leads a good discussion or if it's just powerpoint and facts vomit. If it's the latter, write notes. If it's the former, pay close attention and put everything away. If it's both, just alternate.

Re:Hardly surprising....

[TrekkieGod]

I was schooled in the late 1970's/early 1980's - way before the advent of computers in the classroom. We were taught that writing things down (even copying from a book) helped the content to 'sink in' to your memory far better than just reading it and I believe this to be true - even now when I take my own notes I remember the content pretty well.

I was taught the same thing but didn't really believe it for most of my time in school. That is, until I got to college and had this professor for diff eq. that had the oddest teaching method ever:

At the start of the class he would start writing on the blackboard, not saying a word. He just copied his (very organized) notes to the board. Very dense writing, a lot of content. When that board was filled, he would continue on and do the same thing on a second blackboard that was located on a side-wall of the classroom. About half the class time was spent that way. Then when the boards were filled, and we were finished copying everything, he would go back to the beginning and start talking about what he had written.

It sounds like a colossal waste of class time, but not only did we cover everything the classes in other sessions covered, I never had to study for an exam in that class. While we're copying things down we're reading it and we're paying attention to what we're reading because we need to replicate it. Then when he was actually there explaining things, we already had an idea of what he was going to talk about, we had already thought about it and understood a few things and not others. We weren't distracted by trying to take notes and were actually listening to what he was saying. In fact, when he said something that cleared something up in our minds that wasn't clear from the notes, I'd just jot something quickly in the margin. Which is funny because although that notebook contains the most detailed notes I've ever taken for any class, I've never had to go back to re-read it. Everything just stuck for the exam.

Lowest amount of work and greatest amount of retention I've ever had for any subject in a classroom. It's been about a decade, and I still remember a good deal about slope fields, bifurcations, characteristic equations, and laplace transforms, among other topics. I think the prof also got a kick out of not explaining to anyone that this was his teaching method the first day of class. We were all sitting there and saw this guy just start writing a ton of stuff up on the board. He waited until he got the boards filled up before introducing himself.

Re:Hardly surprising....

[jareth-0205]

That absolutely depends on if your class leads a good discussion or if it's just powerpoint and facts vomit. If it's the latter, write notes. If it's the former, pay close attention and put everything away. If it's both, just alternate.

*Or*... different people respond to different processes differently?

Re:Hardly surprising....

[readin]

I've never understood how note taking helps the information sink in. For me it interferes with listening and understanding. While listening to the lecture I can either think through what is being said, what implications it has other things I know about, how it fits into other things we're learning, and how important it is - or I can be making split-second decisions about what to write down and scribbling furiously while trying to translate spoken words into written notes.

A laptop might make it easier by helping me keep up - I can generally type faster than I can draw letters - but it is still an additional task to perform when I should be learning.

Learning to take notes is a good thing - it is very important for business meetings and such. But for classes where there is a book or a slide deck provided by the teacher I don't see what spending your mental energies on scribbling gets you in terms of learning about the subject.

Re:Hardly surprising....

[Sockatume]

I'm not writing down to remember it later. I'm writing it down to remember it now.

Re:Hardly surprising....

[readin]

That reminds me of my high school Spanish class. We spent the first few minutes of class copying about 10 words and their definitions from the board, then the rest of the class on lecture. I loved that class! Sadly we got a different teacher later.

Re:Hardly surprising....

[ekgringo]

Same here. If the instructor was any good, I would be totally engrossed in what the they were saying that I barely remembered to write any notes. When I would go back to my notes for review later, I'd find just a couple of hastily-written, disconnected, and out-of-context facts that didn't mean anything to me. If I would try to write down everything the instructor put on the chalkboard, I couldn't follow what he or she was saying and retained even less. So, like most other college students, I just crammed the day before a test. Fortunately I'm a good test-taker and was able to retain enough information long enough to do well!

Re:Hardly surprising....

[Anonymous Coward]

That absolutely depends on if your class leads a good discussion or if it's just powerpoint and facts vomit. If it's the latter, write notes. If it's the former, pay close attention and put everything away. If it's both, just alternate.

*Or*... different people respond to different processes differently?

This is absolutely true. My roommate and I in university were taking the same courses, and had totally different ways of understanding a problem. For him, the best way to do it was to watch someone else (e.g. prof, TA) work the problem through. For me, this was useless, this would only be helpful if I already basically understood thing and was just looking to clarify some minor point. For me, the only way I would remember/understand anything complex was to work it through myself, on paper.

I suspect that there are a few different preferred study modes and each of us has one which works best for us. It took me a long time to figure out what mine was - I've often thought there must be a way to identify the one that works best for a given student, and that it would be really helpful if sometime around grade 8-9 schools did this, and spent part of a course teaching you how to study. Even just identifying and teaching everyone all the different ways and letting you figure out for yourself which one worked best would really help, at least for some kids. Not sure if this happens anywhere, but it certainly never did in any school I attended.

Re:Hardly surprising....

[Kal Zekdor]

I'm not writing down to remember it later. I'm writing it down to remember it now.

+1, Field Notes reference.

Re:Hardly surprising....

[ouachiski]

I am the same way. When I was in school I would get permission to get copies of notes from the professor. Most of them would give me notes, but a few times I just got them from other people in the class.

Re:Hardly surprising....

[fearofcarpet]

Several of my organic chemistry courses were taught this way. Since there was no practical way of taking notes digitally at the time (which may still be the case?), we were forced to perfectly transcribe the structures into our notes. I still have most of those notes and can still draw near-perfect benzene rings... and am still picky about pens.

Re:Hardly surprising....

[usuallylost]

There are a lot of different learning styles. Personally I have found that I have to listen to the professor and write down the important points. Just the act of distilling what is said down to those key points and recording them helps me to memorize them. Other people I know are more visual and really need things like power point slides in order to really learn it. Where I barely look at stuff like that as it doesn't really help my understanding in most cases. Figuring out what your learning style is can be a great help when it comes to selecting instructors, class formats etc. Once I realized what I needed to succeed I got better grades in my classes and was much better at recognizing instructors whose teaching style was or was not going to work for me.

Re:Hardly surprising....

[Nimey]

I had a statistics prof who did the pessimal thing and talked while he wrote out massive walls of equations, so one could either pay attention to what he was saying or copy down what he was writing, not easily both.

Re:Hardly surprising....

[neurovish]

Obviously anecdotal, but I was similar. I bounced between phases of taking notes religiously and not taking any notes. When I would take notes religiously, I found them useless because I would flip through them before the test or get stuck on a homework problem and see if there were any hints there and think "I already know all this, I have no need of notes". Then I would not take notes for awhile and find that I forgot everything even doing the "conciously listen to the lecturer" since when taking notes I generally wasn't paying that much attention to what was said and just focusing on the notes.

I never really found taking notes on a laptop terribly useful...didn't quite have the same effect, and a lot of my lectures involved circuit drawings and mathematical equations. Even the ones that didn't I would add boxes and dinosaurs to highlight various points, which is harder to do on a laptop.

Re:Hardly surprising....

[fuzzyf]

We had a professor who started out writing all kinds of stuff on the board, and after a while he asked if we had written it down.
Most of us said: "Yes"
He then asked: "Why?"

Then he proceeded to tell us that he had written down random stuff that had nothing to do with the topic. The point of this exercise was to make us think about what we wrote down. Write it down in our own language and ask questions if we don't understand something. Because if we didn't understand it during the lecture, we wouldn't understand it when reviewing notes later on.

Helped me a lot.

Re:Hardly surprising....

[LordLimecat]

Cut and paste or typing on a screen knowing you can save it to disc for easy recovery later does nothing for the memory - indeed the whole act is designed to save data to magnetic storage rather than brain cells!

Baloney. Paper is also a storage medium, yet recording notes to it still commits it to memory. Likewise, typing is just as much as a memory committal as writing with a pencil.

I will say that multitasking aside, pencil / paper is just a lot more flexible. Unless you have a really good tablet or a good shorthand system, you will always be able to do more detailed notes with pencil / paper, as you can add diagrams, use creative indentation / emphasis, etc that are time consuming to set up on a computer.

Re:Hardly surprising....

[Nemyst]

Interestingly, I had a similar experience with my classical mechanics prof, except he did away with the note-taking altogether. Instead, we'd have to read parts of the course textbook before each class, take a small and simple online quizz to check you'd actually read it (the quizz was very loosely timed so you could go back and pick up the answers from the book if you wanted) and then show up in class with nothing in hand. The entire course was dedicated to the prof showing us a variety of questions, usually in the form of simple problems, and asking us to choose one of four possible answers. Once the problem was exposed, we'd get a few minutes to discuss with others and then would have to vote on what we believed was the correct answer. The prof would then explain the right answer, with more details if more people got it wrong.

It was truly a breath of fresh air compared to any other course structure I have since had. We didn't waste time taking an inordinate amount of notes we'd never read, we didn't have to split our attention between note-taking and what the prof had to say, etc. He also claimed that ever since he started doing that, grades had notably improved in his class.

Re:Hardly surprising....

[Attila Dimedici]

My experience with people who felt the way you do was because of the way they took notes (that may or may not apply to you). The key was not trying to write down everything the lecturer said, but only the key points and/or a sort of outline of the lecture.

Re:Hardly surprising....

[swillden]

IMO it also depends heavily on the nature of the course.

I really suck at memorizing anything, whether I write it down or not. Though writing it helps, assuming the process of writing doesn't cause me to miss something else I should have learned. That's basically why I ended up with a math degree, because in math courses (especially upper division) there is basically no point in trying to memorize anything. Either you understand it or you've got nothing, and what little you might have to memorize is all in the book anyway, in bolded and bulleted definitions and theorems. In those classes it's clearly far better to focus on listening, thinking and understanding; taking notes is a waste of time and a pure distraction.

In classes which are all about absorbing a big pile of facts, memorization aids are useful. In classes which are about understanding ideas, memorization is useless and so are notes. Courses which mix facts and ideas need a mixed approach, and are often the most difficult.

The best example I've seen of the latter is a freshman-level physics (mechanics, mostly) class my wife took, which didn't assume, nor explicate, any calculus. That class was a cast-iron bitch, because if you don't understand simple calculus you have to memorize a whole bunch of variations of every fundamental equation. For her final she had literally pages of equations to memorize, with no obvious relationship between expressions which are actually deeply related, plus she had to understand what all of them meant. The result was a class that was an order of magnitude more difficult than the same class with a calculus pre-req. I tried to get her to let me teach her the necessary calculus, promising that it wasn't more stuff to learn, but less. She didn't believe me and just gutted the course out as presented.

Cause and effect

[nurb432]

Need to not get the 2 confused.

Re:Cause and effect

[Golddess]

Exactly. For the obligatory car analogy, the idea that using a computer to take notes leads to goofing off, seems about as silly as saying drinking alcohol leads to drunk driving.

Re:Cause and effect

[dcw3]

Except that it's not a good analogy. When you're in class and your BFF Skypes you, or sends a chat message, are you going to ignore it? The correct answer should be yes, but we all know how rarely that would actually happen because this generation can't hold an in person conversation w/o answering their cell phone when it buzzes. They think they're multi-tasking, but it's simply rude and distracted. Yes, I know, I'm an old fart, so get the hell off my lawn.

Re:Cause and effect

[Golddess]

When you're in class and your BFF Skypes you, or sends a chat message, are you going to ignore it?

Isn't that a bit like saying "when you're at the bar, and you've had a bit too much too drink, but you really need to get home right away, are you going to just sit there until you sober up?"?

If you focus only on laptop users who will become distracted, then to be fair, you must also focus only on alcohol drinkers who will get behind the wheel when they probably should not.

Recording pen

[erik.martino]

A computer is not the best device for note taking. Using a LiveScribe pen you can transfer your notes to the computer, including a recording the voice of the lecturer. The pen makes your notes hypertext because it is linked with the audio at the time of note taking. It makes it easy to navigate in the audio recording.

Re:Recording pen

[vurian]

Recording the voice... That would have been a recipe for disaster twenty years ago already when a Sinology teacher of mine at Leyden University in the Netherlands totally flipped out because a (disabled -- could not write) student recorded her lecture. She was violating her copyright!

Re:Recording pen

[coolsnowmen]

I would fear lawsuit on equal-opprotunity grounds in a public university setting.

Did the editors use a laptop in their lectures?

[Vorghagen]

Perhaps they should have learned the difference between 'then' and 'than'.

Another hypothesis

[Sigg3.net]

Another hypothesis, arguably more difficult to empirically explicate, would be that the brain treats the two tasks differently memory-wise.

I prefer writing by hand. When the lecture is good, I do my best to get it verbatim. I find that an hour after the lecture has ended, I can cite the professor pretty accurate. However, when I write something on the computer my mind immediately blanks it out.

Consequently, writing by hand is more efficient _in studying_ because my brain at least remembers some of it. I'd think people are different when it comes to this, but for me the difference is considerable.

Re:Another hypothesis

[stewsters]

I have found this to be true with problem solving too. There are some complex programming concepts that are easier for me to work out on paper in cut down pseudo-code and then implement, rather then write out on the computer in comments and implement around. I think writing does use some other part of the brain.

Re:Another hypothesis

[Sigg3.net]

Perhaps it is connected with specific hand-work from the days of making stone tools..

Re:Another hypothesis

[Kal Zekdor]

I have found this to be true with problem solving too. There are some complex programming concepts that are easier for me to work out on paper in cut down pseudo-code and then implement, rather then write out on the computer in comments and implement around. I think writing does use some other part of the brain.

I do a lot of thinking on paper, too. Although I never took straight notes in class (mainly because I didn't need to study), I would listen to the lectures, and when a concept intrigued me, I would start writing out thoughts about the lecture topic. I rarely looked back at those notes when finals came around, but the act of taking in aural information, processing it, iterating on it, and drawing out conclusions on paper, did a lot more than just copying the professor's words verbatim ever could.

I used to do a lot of free writing before (though I rarely have free time these days). I would choose a topic or subject, and just start writing, continuously. Whatever thoughts entered my mind were immediately transferred to paper, with no editing or selection. I would keep doing that until either I reached the end of the thought-stream (i.e., my pen stopped moving), or my hand cramped up. With practice, it was often the latter. It's a great tool for creativity, information processing, and overcoming the hesitation a lot of people feel when starting a work, whether written or otherwise. I highly recommend the practice.

Because I've gotten into the habit of thinking on paper, whenever I'm trying to work out a solution to a particularly complex programming problem (or any kind of problem, really), I start sketching things out either on paper or a whiteboard, sometimes in words, sometimes in diagrams. I start with an idea, and the act of translating that idea onto paper causes me to consider specifics. The idea may or may not change drastically before I'm through, due to concepts and issues that were previously unseen. Not only does writing this sort of thing down help me actually process and refine the ideas, but it also provides a thought record. I can go backwards through the notes to see how and why I arrived at a particular conclusion, which is sometimes useful months down the line.

I always carry a notebook and pen with me. I keep a small pocket sized one on me, and a larger one (with half graph paper, half lined) in my laptop bag. One can never be sure when inspiration strikes. A colleague once started writing on a napkin at a restaurant; I just looked at him with pity and silently handed him my pocket notepad.

Re:Another hypothesis

[Attila Dimedici]

I seem to recall coming across a study that concluded exactly what you are postulating (or at least something that what you are postulating would be a corollary of). I do not remember where I saw it, and it was several years ago, but my recollection was that there was a study indicating that writing with a writing instrument used a different part of the brain than typing something. I believe (although this may have been an interpretation I made on my own) that the study involved MRIs of the brain showing that writing involved the language center of the brain more directly than typing. As I said, I am not positive about that last part since it has been so long since I saw the study.

Re:Another hypothesis

[david_thornley]

Dunno about anyone else, but I work things out in vim.

Re:Another hypothesis

[Sigg3.net]

Evidence is better than anecdotes, so thanks for the input!

Imagine typing a chapter of a book that someone dictates to you into the computer. If you've played Quake, your hands know the keyboard better than anything.You sort of daze off while typing the words you're dictated.

Writing the same chapter by hand while someone is dictating is a different task altogether. And I'd bet you'd remember more of it.

Two other possibilities

[barlevg]

1. People who take hand-written notes often later transcribe them digitally, thus going over the notes one more time than people who just record them digitally in the first place.

2. Studies have that reading harder-to-read fonts assist in recall/retention. Hand-written notes certainly fall in the category of harder-to-read.

They're worried about B+ to B- ?

[sl4shd0rk]

If you would have given me a laptop in school while sitting in some "boring" class I would have been lucky getting a D-

Handwriting Reinforces Learning

[snookerdoodle]

A memory trick I once learned (for remember names or phone numbers, for example) is to write the item with your finger on a roughish surface like your pants 3 times. This often works for me.

There have been studies (like this one) that seem to show that writing something down by hand reinforces learning. I'm surprised the author didn't think this might be relevant.

Re:Handwriting Reinforces Learning

[Anonymous Coward]

A memory trick I once learned (for remember names or phone numbers, for example) is to write the item with your finger on a roughish surface like your pants 3 times. This often works for me.

No Officer, I'm not masturbating in public! I'm using a mnemonic device!

Re:Handwriting Reinforces Learning

[Chris Mattern]

A memory trick I once learned (for remember names or phone numbers, for example) is to write the item with your finger on a roughish surface like your pants 3 times.

How do you get your finger to leave a mark? And what if you're not wearing those pants when you need to remember it?

Re:Handwriting Reinforces Learning

[Xiaran]

My missus does the same thing and it works for her. I tried it after being impressed by it and I coudln't see any improvement for me... memory is a funny thing. My missus remembers phone numbers by remembering the pattern of pushing the buttons on a phone... she will even mime typing the number to recall it. That doesn;t work for me at all... I remember phone numbers by breaking them into sub groups and remembering those.

Re:Handwriting Reinforces Learning

[snookerdoodle]

memory is a funny thing

I agree. My wife remembers all kinds of things (including phone numbers) with no effort at all. Me? I'd forget the sub groups, too. I was so grateful to learn the "writing with my finger" trick. Then again, I remember places and directions even years later quite naturally.

Re:Handwriting Reinforces Learning

[neurovish]

Just wanted to mention that I hate it when people don't follow the proper phone number cadence when reciting a number...I can't even remember past 4 numbers long enough to punch the digits into my phone when that happens.

Re:Handwriting Reinforces Learning

[dcw3]

I work in a lot of areas where I have to punch in codes to get in a door, or codes for conference calls. If you asked me the number, I'd have to punch it out to tell you the actual numbers.

Taking notes

[Hatta]

Taking notes in general is just distracting. Better to listen and think, and use the book when you get home.

Re:Taking notes

[coolsnowmen]

This, for me, is the benefit of printed out slides. Enough that I can take just a few notes of important things only said, with out me having to spend too much of my time just taking dictation and not being able to think/understand/ask questions in class..

Is study controlled for not taking notes?

[Diss Champ]

I find that taking very sparse notes, or none, depending on the subject, I will get more out of a lecture. As long as there is a good textbook or other reference I can use it to clarify confusions later. I find generally that when writing or typing, the info isn't being stored in my brain as well.

Of course, I often also find it helpful to have a book on an unrelated subject and to split my attention back and forth to it and the lecture to control my short attention span, so I'm weird.

Taking notes period lowers grades

[Anonymous Coward]

My GPA went up one full letter grade when I stopped taking notes in class - period. It was far more instructive to actually pay attention to what was being said and to think about it while it was being discussed, than to simply focus all of my cerebral effort on transcribing what was being written on the board.

Re:Taking notes period lowers grades

[Kielistic]

Amen to that. It was always great to have a prof that felt the need to hide requisite information in their lectures that wasn't in the textbook. I understand they're trying to forcibly help the not so great students. But if they're punishing the students that don't do well with babysitting soon the only students they'll have left are the ones that need babysitting. Which is a pretty common complaint amongst profs from what I've heard.

Re:Taking notes period lowers grades

[chienandalou]

A lot of people have never learned how to take notes!

I agree that anxiously trying to transcribe everything is distracting.

But good notes are not transcription or stenography. They are a way of processing and organizing what is going on, making it your own, and moving farther.

Think of notes as

1. Keeping an *outline* of the the content: even as you are recording, you are paying attentive to its structure.
2. Letting you record your own queries, doubts, confusions, and challenges as you go along.
3. Giving you a picture of the whole presentation: you can look back up the page at what has gone before and ask yourself if it hangs together. You can draw arrows linking parts.
4. More ambitiously, you can make diagrams of the argument, or start working out your own argument.

-

Tangentially, I've noticed that a lot of students anxiously copy any rubbish I write on the board, but stare into space if I tell them something they need to know.

those required to multitask got lower scores

[emilper]

the multitasking sample got the lower scores, not the laptop using sample as a whole

But half were also asked to complete a series of unrelated tasks on their computers when they felt they could spare some time.

Re:those required to multitask got lower scores

[Anonymous Coward]

In the second experiment, some students were given pencils and paper to take notes during a lecture while others worked on laptops.

The students in the first experiment who were asked to multitask averaged 11 per cent lower on their quiz. The students in the second experiment who were surrounded by laptops scored 17 per cent lower.

Read the whole article next time, rather than looking for the first quote you can find to denounce it.

Doesn't need to be multi-tasking

[gstoddart]

Multi-tasking is a plausible explanation, but I can posit another one quite easily.

If instead of focusing on writing the content you're trying to do any form of formatting, layout, entering equations, trying to do diagrams -- you are already multi-tasking and part of your attention is on the device instead of what you're listening to.

I've tried taking notes on a laptop, and I found it distracting and more trouble than it's worth. If you can see the Prof is drawing a quadrant or a graph, you can do that by hand far faster on a sheet of paper.

Maybe someone can do it, but for me, I find that good old fashioned paper is still the most effective way for me to take notes and commit stuff to paper and I can annotate it later.

I just don't think the input techniques we have available to us are anywhere near as effective as pen and paper.

My guess? Give someone a laptop which has no internet connectivity while they're taking notes, and with only the application open they're directly using -- and they'll still do worse.

Re:Doesn't need to be multi-tasking

[Glires]

I completely agree. Not just in school but I've also found it true in business meetings. The only notes worth taking have drawings, charts, annotations, margin notes, circled words, arrows, non-roman characters, etc. If the information is something that is easy to type on a laptop, then chances are that nobody needed it to be written down in the first place.

Re:Doesn't need to be multi-tasking

[jittles]

Multi-tasking is a plausible explanation, but I can posit another one quite easily.

If instead of focusing on writing the content you're trying to do any form of formatting, layout, entering equations, trying to do diagrams -- you are already multi-tasking and part of your attention is on the device instead of what you're listening to.

I've tried taking notes on a laptop, and I found it distracting and more trouble than it's worth. If you can see the Prof is drawing a quadrant or a graph, you can do that by hand far faster on a sheet of paper.

Maybe someone can do it, but for me, I find that good old fashioned paper is still the most effective way for me to take notes and commit stuff to paper and I can annotate it later.

I just don't think the input techniques we have available to us are anywhere near as effective as pen and paper.

My guess? Give someone a laptop which has no internet connectivity while they're taking notes, and with only the application open they're directly using -- and they'll still do worse.

I got my first laptop back when they were still pretty expensive (intel 486). I took all of my notes in college on the laptop, except math. Math was too much of a chore on the laptop. I found that, because I can easily average 150WPM on the keyboard, I could spend more time actually listening to the lecturer and less time trying to actually note what they were saying. I definitely feel like this helped me to concentrate more on the lecture. If it was a dumb class, or an easy A for me, then I would play video games while the teacher lectured, and pause them if the teacher broached a subject that I felt I needed more knowledge on.

As the NRA would say

[colinrichardday]

You'll get my Freecell when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands!

Re:As the NRA would say

[gstoddart]

You'll get my Freecell when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands!

Well, if you don't pay enough attention in class, you might have cold hands because you got crappy grades since you were taking notes on a laptop and can't afford to pay rent. ;-)

Re:As the NRA would say

[colinrichardday]

I finished school well before I ever had a laptop.

what about smaller classes vs big lectures?

[Joe_Dragon]

what about smaller classes vs big lectures?

theory based classes vs more hands on ones

[Joe_Dragon]

theory based classes vs more hands on ones they need to look into that as well. I say lot's of people in theory classes it's based more on how is good at test cramming

Do people really take notes on a laptop?

[dugancent]

No one I went to undergrad with used a laptop. Granted, my undergrad was chemistry and its hard as hell when 3/4 of the notes are diagrams of complex reactions.

I take that back. There was one girl who had a convertible laptop with a stylus.

My notes on TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Students who used laptops did worse

2. Soriano deal paying off for the Yankees

3. Cowell's fiance settled divorce with old hubby

4. Students who used laptops did better?

5. Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs - perfect casting

Mental discipline is not as necessary with laptop

[John Allsup]

If you have no calculator, you need to master mental arithmetic.  If you have a calculator, you just keep a-pressing those buttons, and don't even notice when something goes amiss (like when you (think you) pressed 5 * 7 6 3 = and got 4578).
If you rely on a wordprocessor to type your work rather than a typesetting language, you can just tap away until things look about right, whereas with non wysiwyg methods you need to have a greater understanding of how the document is set out.
If you can recall your notes from your laptop via Spotlight or from some database, you don't need to learn to organise your notes like you do with paper.

These and many more examples are the problem.  Pen and paper rewards a disciplined mind in a way that mindlessly tapping away on a laptop doesn't.  (When writing my PhD thesis, I first handwrote pretty much everything, then typed it up in LaTeX.  When helping someone set out precise diagrams in Microsoft Word, I ended up having to print to postscript, preview in gv (this was circa 2000) and then move things around in Word so that they looked wrong in Word but right on paper.)

Laptops reward non-intelligent laziness in a bad way, and people who use computers should be encouraged more to learn to do things in a harder and more manual way to learn the self-discipline, and the need for sufficient practice to maintain this discipline, before fully relying on a computer to make life easier.

There is a well known saying in mathematics: once you've learned to do things the hard way, people don't care if you're sloppy.  Learn things the hard way first.

Worse than the article suggests

[Anonymous Coward]

The effect was observed not only on the person using the laptop to take notes, but also on the surrounding students who weren't, presumably because the laptop was a significant distraction.

Ability to extend, reogranize and search

[YurB]

To me the greatest advantage of digital notes over pen and paper is that I can extend a topic when I acquire additional information on it (whereas on paper there's usually no physical space to do that), reorganize them by merging related notes into a single unit and also search through them.

Also, I type much faster than I write and I can shape and transform my notes very easily with Org-mode.

But actually I'd prefer if there was some collaborative note-taking going on instead of the huge duplication of work as it is now. Something like wiki-notes, where the purpose of taking notes would be not to recreate them each time but to make them better over time and update them.

Horrible article title

[StormyWeatherL33T]

This study wasn't about the difference in performance for those who take notes on a laptop versus by hand. It was about people who surf the 'net while in class. Unsurprisingly, people weren't able to focus on the class as much when they did that. Derp.

Interesting Definitions

[EireannX]

It is interesting to see how people here define 'Taking Notes'. There seem to be the two polar extremes of 'feverishly transcribing everything' and taking no notes whatsoever. There is a good middle ground of listen, learn, document your understanding. Apart from the distraction, laptops are poor because you just cannot sketch a diagram or simple flowchart as quickly as you can on paper. Even formal logic symbols, set notation or any of those visual representations of relationships are hard to come by quickly. Scribbling down your understandings as they come to you is more efficient than just listening, because translating the discovery into your own words and writing it down are two powerful mnemonic devices. You also get to choose the words that best describe the understanding you have gleaned, rather than using someone else's words.

Memorization based classes

[Ambassador Kosh]

It looks like the entire thing was just wrote memorization which is darn close to completely worthless. People took notes and then did a multiple choice exam to repeat back the information in the notes.

Honestly, with or without a computer I find it very hard to pay attention or care in any memorization based class. The experience is pointless since memorizing the information gives you nothing on how to really use it, how to evaluate if you are within bounds for something, out of bounds, at an unstable point etc.

That is why I like my engineering classes. They give us real problems on exams and expect us to solve them in a more realistic way at least. The exams are normally open book, notes, pretty darn advanced calculators etc and the problems are hard as hell. If you don't understand how to approach the problems, how to figure out how to do them you have no chance of solving them in time. You can't learn from the book as you go. However, during the exams you need to figure out what information you need that is not provided in the problem, look at up in the books in charts, tables, equations etc.

As a result your hand is not held at every step. You are not told you will need certain values from the steam tables, others from phase diagrams, other relationships or equilibriums etc. You are expected to figure that out just like you do in the real world.

During our classes laptops are great for notes. Most of our lectures are on practical problem solving and being able to look things up, use MATLAB or Excel to work on the problems etc is a huge gain and you have those later to refer to. One of the things our professors emphasize is to LOOK IT UP. If you do something from memorization and it is wrong you can get people killed in engineering. It takes almost no effort and time to look something up so look it up every single time.

The important things to learn in class are how to setup the problems, why you set them up that way, what boundaries you need to watch for, what does the answer mean etc. The actual mechanical cranking of solving the problem is something that you pretty much just hand to a computer now. Being able to solve a system of 40+ ODEs by hand is not a useful skill. You will screw that up and you will waste a lot of time getting stuck in the details instead of learning how understand the system and how stable it is.

Re:Memorization based classes

[gstoddart]

It looks like the entire thing was just wrote memorization

Pssst ... it's rote not wrote. Typical engineer.

Re:Memorization based classes

[msobkow]

Memorization has it's place.

You memorize biology diagrams and the names of bones and muscles as well as other systems.

You memorize physics formulas.

You memorize mathematical theorums.

True, you need to understand the meaning of what you've memorized and how to apply it, but the memorization is required none the less.

I'd bet you do poorly at memorized material for the most part, which is why you denigrate it so. People always "poo poo" the things they're not good at.

Re:Memorization based classes

[Ambassador Kosh]

If I do something from memory and accidents or worth deaths happen as a result what will happen is I would be found personally guilty of criminal negligence. It is NOT okay for an engineer to do formulas, values for constants etc from memory. Sure you can get away with it for a while but if anything happens it is your ass directly on the line.

Memorization is not required and it is dangerous to do. That is a primary way that people screw up. Your memory is not even close to perfect. You forget bits and pieces and worse your brain fills in the details. So you can be completely confident you remembered something correctly that is incorrect. It doesn't matter if I think I can memorize stuff well or badly, it is something that is negligent behavior and leads to serious problems. Doctors are probably the worse offenders of this right now which is why basic expert systems already do over 50% better at diagnosis and prescription at half the cost as measured by patient outcomes. No matter what you think humans should not be memorizing information, it is a waste.

Look at all the studies on the accuracy of eyewitness testimonies. It ends up basically being the same thing. Look it up every time, all the time. Have a computer keep track of details and have it so that you can just put in what you need (steam at given temp and pressure, some constant etc) and it looks it up.

invalid comparison. Compare surfing while pencil

[raymorris]

They compared people taking notes (with a pencil) to people taking notes WHILE surfing the web, as instructed.

To see how taking notes on a laptop compares to taking notes with a pencil as per TFS, they should have compared either:

only taking notes (with a pencil) vs. only taking notes (with a laptop)
and / or
taking notes (with a pencil) while surfing the web vs. taking notes (with a laptop) while surfing the web

What they actually compared was "taking notes" vs. "surfing the web and taking notes".
They just assumed that anyone with a laptop has to surf the web in class, thereby learning something amazing - multitasking reduces performance.
That's an amazing new discovery!

People still use Laptops

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

How cute.

The tool matters

[YurB]

I don't see any information on how the students were taking notes on their machines. Just "taking notes on laptops" may mean anything.

I wouldn't be able to take any notes in Microsoft Word or LibreOffice. But in Org-mode I actually take notes more efficiently than I can do than on paper.

Re:Taking Notes on a Facebook Machine...

[BrokenHalo]

Taking Notes on a Facebook Machine lowers your grades.

Probably true. Having passed through tertiary education several times over the course of my supposed "adulthood" (ha!), most recently graduating (again) in 2010, I have noticed that my fellow-students with the highest failure rates at university were those with the most dominant tendency to fritter time away on Facebook. I may not have been the most outstandingly brilliant of students, but at least I didn't have that handicap. Maybe because I'm just antisocial and unsociable (sigh)... :-}

As for note-taking, in my discipline (biochemistry and molecular biology) it is probably impossible to take useful notes on a computer (except very slowly, unless you happen to be such a genius that you don't need notes at all), so the old-school pen-and-paper approach is still by far the best.

Re:YMMV

[YurB]

Fully agree with you. If I was provided with a LibreOffice (or Word) screen and told to take notes on it, it would have been a torture for me. But with Org-mode and a Dvorak keyboard I feel much more comfortable than with pen and paper. I also wrote my masters in Org-mode. The ability to use Git also helped me a lot to control how my text evolved.

Not for me

[Drethon]

I got a 3.3 GPA in my undergrad while using paper notes and a 4.0 in grad school while using a computer. Not exactly a balanced comparison but...

While going through grad school I found that I did best if I played a game that required little mental activity to keep my mind from wandering away from the lecture (Eve Online mining or mission running was excellent). Then for notes I did better if I didn't take a note for everything but instead listened to everything the lecturer said and then summarized during the breaks.

Just my bent $0.02...

Sadly and badly wrong!

[aglider]

surfing the net or checking email [...] reduces concentration

Surfing the net or checking email defies concentration.

Stupid Angry Birds

[happy_place]

IMO, it's gaming in class during lectures given by ancient professors who could bore the paint off the walls on topics of study that are genetically predisposed to cause blindness by its very nature due to sheer boringness... Essentially you bring a device into class that has the potential to make your class less boring, but only in the sense that it keeps you from having to endure sheer boredom to the point where you force yourself to learn the material.

Were they touch-typing?

[lfp98]

I've often taken notes on laptop at seminars and scientific meetings, and I've found it helps me concentrate on the talks. Taking notes on paper is distracting primarily because it requires constant glancing down at the paper. Further, I can type much faster than I can write. Rather than transcribing exactly what the speaker is saying, though, I find myself putting things in my own words, which keeps my attention from straying. But it's essential to be typing by touch and not looking down at the keyboard or the screen, which is as distracting as writing on paper. Typing errors, sometimes approaching one per word, can be corrected later, and in fact provide a convenient opportunity to review the material. If the study excluded surfers and included only touch-typists, I'm confident the laptop note-takers would do better.

Misleading Headline

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA says the problem is multitasking (or being around someone multitasking.) NOT just using a computer. People multitasked in classes before computers were invented, actually. But they didn't test people doodling or writing outlines for classes in other subjects or simply writing paper letters, did they?

The other problem is classes that do not engage or hold attention, encouraging multitasking to occur. (I'm going to give you a really boring lecture, all of which is easily found in your textbook, and I expect you to simply regurgitate what I'm telling you and do no thinking of your own....) I had several classes back in the mid-90s when I used my laptop and I played solitaire or read a donwloaded "newspaper" built up from CompuServe. Know what difference that made to my life? Well, it made the classes more bearable. But nobody today really cares that I got a C+ in Philosophy instead of an A.

Optimal Habits From "Back In The Day"

[assertation]

One of the best things I did as a college freshman was to take an optional study skills workshop offered by the university.

I was taught that the optimal way to do things ( yes, I realize the optimal way isn't always possible ) was to take thorough notes from the text book before the lecture, then use the lecture to listen to the professor without your attention being distracted less with the need to write things down. This frees you up to think about the material while s/he is speaking, ask yourself questions about it, ask the professor questions, and get the material reenforced by hearing it twice.

Makes sense, the textbook is a static resource you can access anytime. An opportunity for a live interactive talk isn't.

Plus if you go in already being introduced to the material you already know what isn't clear to you and you can take advantage of the opportunity to have a live expert to clear up questions you have.

Re:Taking Notes on a Facebook Machine...

[Marxist Hacker 42]

It occurs to me that a tablet, with a stylus, and a good indexed note taking application *full screen* would be superior to pen-and-paper.

But that would necessitate *NOT* replying to e-mail and social media.

"Lower marks then students who..."

[PhilHibbs]

THAN! Not THEN! Than is a comparison, X is lower than Y. Then means subsequent, X happened then Y happened. I usually ignore this on twitter and forums, but when a news item gets it wrong then I get annoyed.

Re:"Lower marks then students who..."

[dragon-file]

Prime example of someone who was using a computer take notes when they were supposed to learning about THAN and THEN. Good catch.

Re:"Lower marks then students who..."

[gsslay]

Seriously, what is so hard about these two words that they are so commonly confused with each other?

It's like mixing up tan and ten, or pen and pan. They are completely different words that mean completely different things.

Re:"Lower marks then students who..."

[heteromonomer]

If only I had mod points... Sick how many people on this supposedly literate site make this mistake.

Re:"Lower marks then students who..."

[Chemisor]

Then you must be smarter than a third grader. If only their was an award for being as smart as there.

Missing camera option

[couchslug]

In my CNC class I sit up front and photograph the whiteboard using my phone.

Other students began doing it too and it's worked well for them.

I'm also politely vocal about finding hand-written "anything" an abomination and point out the instructor could simply do one set of "notes" in PowerPoint for class use and student download. He has started doing that amid much rejoicing. Handwriting is righly obsolete elsewhere and the sooner it's replaced by printed text the better. Text offers faster visual recognition and there is no reason to write again what has once been written when it could as easily be transcribed into text.

An example I cite against handwriting is medical prescription error. How DARE anyone want handwriting when important information must be conveyed precisely? I grew up with the usual classes devoted to making pretty cursive writing and was never impressed. Calligraphy is for hobbyists, text is for communication.

Re:Missing camera option

[orgelspieler]

Whippersnappers and their fancy phones.

We had one looney calculus professor who would start the class with 6 [chalk/white]boards full of notes, examples, assignments, etc. Nearly as soon as the class would start, she would begin erasing and writing more stuff. There was no way to take notes on the lecture, and write down all of her examples unless you didn't have class before hers and could show up to copy.

One day, an enterprising engineering student showed up with a Polaroid and sold prints to the more desperate students, or the ones that would show up late. He switched majors to business the next semester.

"lower marks than"

[bambewn]

This must have been typed with a laptop ;)

I Want To See A Different Study

[Githaron]

I want to see a study that compares students that take all notes by hand and students that are given the notes before the lecture and then make supplemental notes. I always found note taking distracting from thinking about the lecture but at the same time I always wanted to have a reference so that I know what a professor deems important. From personal experience, I believe being given a set of notes / detailed PowerPoint slides with the option of adding to them is more conducive to retention and understanding.

Re:Taking Notes on a Facebook Machine...

[BrokenHalo]

It occurs to me that a tablet, with a stylus, and a good indexed note taking application *full screen* would be superior to pen-and-paper.

I agree, except that I don't see any machine with sufficiently low latency (yet) to cope with a real lecture situation involving diagrammatic input. I would have loved to have been able to do away with those massive screeds of note-paper (just as as I would have liked to have my massively cumbersome textbooks on a usable ebook format, but that's another story), but it wasn't possible then, and it's still not really possible now.

Re:Taking Notes on a Facebook Machine...

[dcw3]

While your point is well taken, I would suggest that a study of the most successful graduates (we'd need to quantify this somehow) should be done, say 10-20 years after graduation. Identify groups who spent more time socializing than studying, and those who were bookworms, then see how they progressed over time. Just saying...I've seen a lot of successful people who weren't the brightest bulbs, and a lot of rocket scientists who didn't get that far ahead financially.

Focus!

[wlj]

As a university instructor who encourages the use of laptops in class, I feel it is mostly a matter of focus. (I am teaching intro stat and operations research.) I tell the students to bring a laptop, but it is a tool and we will be looking at how to use that tool to solve problems. (I also tell them that if they want to watch youtube or hulu they should sit at the back of the class and use headphones to keep the distraction down for the other students.)

Note taking was essential in graduate courses

[nayrbn]

Many of the math graduate courses I've taken had no followed textbook or even official course notes, and in those classes it was essential to take notes. I remember going back through my notes at the end of the day or the next day to rework them, and that helped a lot in understanding. I think the pace of the classes were fast enough, at least for some of them, or my knowledge at the time incomplete enough, that the pace of class was too fast. So I had to "preserve" it, perhaps without understanding all the details, and then review. Come to think of it, I think I've only had one to three courses that diligently followed a textbook. Math is a funny subject to learn, I suppose, as powerpoint I feel is very bad for it. Sometimes you can learn entirely new things just by taking with another person, and I think that is the coolest thing ever. No writing ever done! All the visualization is done in the brain. However, to really understand the material, you need to work it out, as your brain cannot keep all the necessary information in your head at once.

Law School

[Etherwalk]

... some of the participants didn't even adhere to the instructions for their group, i.e., they surfed and screwed around when they weren't supposed to. And then did poorly on a quiz. Gee, who saw that coming?

Sit in the back of a big law school class. You will usually find at least 20% of the girls looking at clothes and 20% of the guys looking at sports. And probably closer to 90% of the class is checking email or facebook during the class.

Re:Law School

[Zordak]

I resent that generalization. I rarely sat at the back of the class in law school. One of the few was Secured Transactions my last quarter, but I did not look at sports. I played Snood.

Duh

[neminem]

They wasted money on that? And got it printed in a journal? *Obviously* people with any device that just *yells* out, "the internet is right here! And all your favorite time-wasting games!", are not going to pay as much attention to lectures, especially lectures that aren't very interesting. I say as someone who totally intended to take notes in all sorts of classes that I ended up playing a lot of Nethack in instead.

Headline should just read: "Goofing off in lecture and not paying as much attention lowers grades." Which, duh.

Use the laptop...

[dragon-file]

...to record the audio from the lesson while you play farmville or whatever hell kids play these days. Problem solved.

Re:Use the laptop...

[PPH]

Old story, pre laptop:

One professor noted an increase in students who brought tape recorders to his lectures to take notes. Not just this, but some would have a classmate bring their recorder to class to record the lectures, not even bothering to show up. So he began a practice of covering certain important material by writing everything, including responses to students questions on the blackboard without saying a word.

Re:Use the laptop...

[dragon-file]

dick move. Modern tech has solved that problem as well.... mount a web cam on your laptop facing away from you.... make sure you have a good view of the whiteboard. Record video and audio. Problem double solved.

Re:Use the laptop...

[hguorbray]

reminds me of an old cartoon/story or something:

ends up with the TA bringing in a tape recorder to play the professor's prerecorded lecture to a classroom full of tape recorders

course nowadays it would just get posted to youtube or something...

-I'm just sayin'

Re:Taking Notes on a Facebook Machine...

[ttucker]

I have yet to find a tablet that you could write on with a pen as well as paper.

Note Taking Appliance?

[gr33nlantern]

I would like to see this study re-done with a third group who uses a note taking appliance such as the Surface Pro with OneNote and a stylus. Does the stylus and the act of 'writing' instead of typing change the results? I would imagine someone with an organized method in a program like OneNote that is purpose-built for note taking would have a leg-up on the paper/pen crowd.

Best for me was eMate

[DdJ]

The best note-taking device I ever used for classes was the old Apple eMate.

For those who are not familiar: it's basically an Apple Newton in a subnotebook shell.

It had a note-taking app that worked either with the built-in keyboard or with the stylus.

Now, my first job out of high school back in the day was as a word-processing secretary, back when very few people used computers directly. As a result, my typing speed is very fast compared to many of my peers. When the note-taking is the sort that is easy to accommodate with typing, I can work pretty fast.

But not all note-taking is suitable for typing. Sometimes you've got a diagram. Sometimes you've got equations. Sometimes you've got accented characters or the phonetic alphabet.

On the eMate, I'd type away, and when a diagram came up, I'd just pick up the stylus and draw it, exactly as I would on paper. Then I'd go back to typing. Flowing back and forth was seamless. It was awesome.

(The battery would also last for days, sometimes even weeks, and the display was perfectly readable in lighting conditions from full sunlight to complete dark. Why? Because it was a monochrome LCD, which with sufficient lighting doesn't need the backlighting that color LCDs require.)

Another factor: there was absolutely no wireless connectivity at the time, and the device didn't multitask (from a user interface perspective, that is; it did have full background processing, but one app controlled the display at a time).

There was no temptation to multitask. There were no distractions.

Couple that with the rich tagging and indexing built in, and it was an extremely useful.

(Today, I use an iPad and bluetooth keyboard for note-taking, primarily because of the lack of multitasking (again, from a user interface point of view). And I'll often throw the device into airplane mode while doing this. I might still use that old eMate, if not for the blasted Y2K10 bug...)

Re:Taking Notes on a Facebook Machine...

[Dcnjoe60]

It occurs to me that a tablet, with a stylus, and a good indexed note taking application *full screen* would be superior to pen-and-paper.

But that would necessitate *NOT* replying to e-mail and social media.

It might if you could have a stylus that would let you write as small and accurately as a pen or pencil would, but the stylus' that are common today that are about the size of one's finger hardly would facilitate good note taking. You could get more notes on a 3x5 index card with a pen than you can on an iPad with a stylus in real time (I'm not talking about sitting there and carefully writing things out on the iPad, I'm talking about taking notes in a lecture setting). Face it the touch screens on most tablets were not made for handwriting, but for gestures.

Re:Taking Notes on a Facebook Machine...

[Dcnjoe60]

While your point is well taken, I would suggest that a study of the most successful graduates (we'd need to quantify this somehow) should be done, say 10-20 years after graduation. Identify groups who spent more time socializing than studying, and those who were bookworms, then see how they progressed over time. Just saying...I've seen a lot of successful people who weren't the brightest bulbs, and a lot of rocket scientists who didn't get that far ahead financially.

You would have so many variables to factor out that it would be impossible to do such a study. For instance, their socioeconomic background is going to have a lot more to say about their success than whether or not they were socializing versus studying.

Taking notes by hand

[Lawrence_Bird]

was long ago shown to improve long term retention. This is not a surprise at all.

Handwriting Notes

[endus]

I was in college just at the cusp of people starting to take notes on laptops. It never appealed to me. Even today in meetings, the information just doesn't sink in like it does with hand writing notes. I take notes in meetings that I know I will never read, just because it helps pound it into my memory.

I can never keep notes on the computer organized either. Not that my paper notes are super organized, but at least there is an indestructible (unless I rip pages out) linear timeline to everything. You know everything is there somewhere and if you can't remember where the other things you were taking notes on at the time can help you zero in.

Re:Taking Notes on a Facebook Machine...

[Ambassador Kosh]

So use something like a galaxy note 8, microsoft surface pro or any other tablet with an active pen and a wacom digitizer. Just because the VAST majority of tablets are crappy for notes does not mean that good ones don't exist.

Tablets can be great for notes. You just have to get one of the right ones.

um, it's *than* not *then*

[vpness]

did you take notes in English class on a laptop ? :) (pls don't mod me down, the irony of the post made me do it )

Someone needs to revisit activities.

[niftymitch]

Someone needs to revisit the activities in Sugar.

The game of user interfaces time and time again is one of distraction and eye candy. However like the abusive use of fonts in "Wired" these look fancy devices are instead derisive.

University researchers need to research constructive task oriented interfaces and how they can be restructured to be more productive.
Oh wait the researchers are distracted and will never finish...

Each time the OLPC folk crank the hardware and software engine I am impressed up to a point where the issue of teaching and work flow run over each other. It does get better but inventors need to teach more. A new invention without teachers notes and not just Cliff notes is the tree that fell in the forest and no one heard it.

Answer - sit in the correct seat

[Overzeetop]

It took me two years of college, and a stint working in the real work, to realize that if you're not sitting in the front row, you're not getting your money's worth*. Partly, for me, was a slight decrease in my visual acuity (I went from 20:15 in HS to 20:40 at the end of college before I finally got glasses), but mostly it's a matter of focus. This would be true if people are surfing on laptops around you - being in the front row means not having a screen in your line of sight. It also means that the teacher or professor is seeing your reaction and more heavily gauging material absorption based on your speed.

It's funny (and not in a humorous way) how we denigrate students who voluntarily sit in the front and participate in class through all of our "free" education, and then once we start paying several thousand dollars out of our own pocket realize that the front row really is the "value" proposition in education.

*Unless the class is easy, you have a friend taking it with you, and you like to heckle the professor...in which case I suggest middle of the audience for best effect. (Grad Statistics, best class ever)

comp sci

[orgelspieler]

I remember taking notes on a computer in comp sci. It was great. By the time the lecture was over I had finished the assignments for the next class and emailed (Pine?) myself the annotated code. The prof was really attentive, too. So if you were playing a game or IM'ing, he'd shut you down, or worse, make your chat window visible on everybody's screen. Fun times.

Not necssarily

[Overzeetop]

While correlation does not always show causality, a sufficiently large study will tend to flatten all of the other variables. To say the study is flawed implies that you can demonstrate how a bias exists (writing-based learners were more likely to get computers). In fact, having a computer - for you - is clearly a hindrance, by your own admission. It sounds like you should have an audio or AV recorder for the lecture and then transcribe notes at your leisure afterwards.

I'm much like you, but for most engineering coursework a keyboard is horrible for note taking. The interesting stuff is in equations and diagrams. I find that pencil and paper allow me to verify that I understand the material real-time, provided it is delivered slowly enough to transcribe. Handouts of the professors notes are nice, but I don't get nearly the retention as if I do the work myself.

I'm in private practice now, and I find I take very, very few notes when on sites. Mostly I listen and watch, building an engineering model of the situation in my head to evaluate the gross physics, then write my initial findings down immediately following a review of a structure. Others are different - they measure everything and make sense of it later.

Re:Taking Notes on a Facebook Machine...

[Kielistic]

I have a note8. I paid the extra for it exactly because it had the active digitiser. It is great for organizing thoughts and writing personal notes. If you are writing notes on a presentation or scrambling/scribbling a pen and paper is still vastly superior.

The act of writing helps memory

[msobkow]

I found that the act of writing itself helps me to memorize material, especially when I'm condensing my notes instead of writing things down verbatim. I used to study by re-writing and re-condensing my course notes in university at the end of the semester a couple or three times, until I had an entire course down to 1-2 sheets of bullet points.

Reading textbooks or just rereading my notes didn't work nearly as well. I think the difference is that when you're condensing material, you're actually thinking about it instead of just browsing/skimming it.

Worked for me...

Re:The act of writing helps memory

[GodfatherofSoul]

Don't get sucked into the notes trap though. I learned the hard way you can easily find yourself writing so much down that you're in a dictation cycle and not really processing what the lecturer is saying. You have to find the balance of doing the compression on the fly just to preserve the thought. I actually found that I'd reread notes and expand some comments to clarify what I'd condensed during the lecture. This way you don't fall behind during the lecture and still have enough pure listening time to process or even engage the professor.

Laptop notes never really helped me

[Kaptain Kruton]

Perhaps the grades are lower because the notes are not as helpful.

When I was in college, I always found that laptop notes were of little to no use when taking notes for anything other than text. If I wanted to copy a graph, I couldn't do so without wasting time or taking my focus away from the prof. If I needed to draw a diagram, I couldn't do it very well on my laptop's small touch pad. And finally, if anything involved non-standard text (subscripts, mathematical symbols, etc), then I encountered even more difficulty. Using a stylus and a tablet may be easier than a laptop now... but that is still just writing and I would rather do it on paper in most cases.

-Me

Re:Mental discipline is not as necessary with lapt

[Kielistic]

Everything you said is true but we can't be complete masters of every base concept before moving on to more complex ones. Eventually we have to be able to take our tools for granted in order to make more advanced tools to take for granted. There will be plenty of things you do that someone else will call you lazy and sloppy for not learning base principles for.

Definitely a distraction issue

[GodfatherofSoul]

I used a tablet to take notes and actually DID take notes. I usually sat in back of the class (I'm a little agoraphobic) and could see most students in front of me. The people who were using their laptops to type out notes were never able to stick with it for long. It was too compelling a distraction. My guess is it's a combination of the utility of surfing/goofing in combination with the impracticality of note-taking on a laptop.

I doubt its multitasking

[viperidaenz]

I find it much easier to understand and remember something if I write it down on paper.
Much better than typing it out or drawing diagrams in EA.

Re:better quality?

[TaoPhoenix]

Okay, I'll reply to you, representative of the other comments because I think everyone is missing the mark.

Here we go!

1. The Paradigm is wrong. It's like asking if a car is better than a plane because the plane is "clunkier" to use proportional to training. But no one seriously wants to drive time-efficiency-wise if they really have a big goal. Same here. Computers are the greatest informational processing system ever designed, yet it seems many people are having trouble matching the "old school" pencil&pen on paper. (I use both - Blue Pen = AutoBold, pencil prevents scribbles.)

Paper is indeed powerful. But then the problem seems to be how to *match or exceed* the power of paper, on a computer.

2. The format is wrong. Lectures should be provided pre-recorded as Audio-Visual files *for reference*. I'll leave for another day whether before the class or after, etc. But the point is to take out the whole silly pressure/fear of missing info, so indeed you can then sit there and concentrate, and/or have already prepped the lecture the day before if that's your thing. So then notes quit being desperate attempts to catch it all once, and you can process it. Play the pre-recorded version four times! Then go to class and ask why you don't get equation five.

This touches into silly issues like copyright, but also professor laziness. Give the Hacker Club two months and $3000 of materials and you'll have an auto-recording whiteboard, even maybe if a little grainy.

3. Software
I completely agree a million text/rtf files are a mess trying to take notes. But I am now an advocate of a Tree database note program. You take structured notes in your hierarchical tree, and you can move each note all around as you learn more you just go back and update the note.

THAT is the game changer for me. It's the only software that for me has exceeded pen and paper, maybe coupled with spreadsheets for the math side of notes & data crunching.

"Then" / "Student"

[Smirker]

Who needs conjunctions and plurals when you make submissions using your laptop!

walk vs talk...

[Fubari]

You take it correctly.
I use a treadmill desk, and when I really need to think deeply about something (for example, intricate code logic), I end up stopping walking while I think through the details.
*shrug* Try debugging something on a treadmill and let me know how it goes; of course, your mileage may vary.

I take it walking and talking are not considered two task at once. Unless you mean high-level tasks (ie the ones we are conscious about, not like walking and such).

Re:Taking Notes on a Facebook Machine...

[Dcnjoe60]

So use something like a galaxy note 8, microsoft surface pro or any other tablet with an active pen and a wacom digitizer. Just because the VAST majority of tablets are crappy for notes does not mean that good ones don't exist.

Tablets can be great for notes. You just have to get one of the right ones.

I understand that there are tablets available that are capable of handling handwriting. However, is it reasonable to expect that every family is going to buy another tablet for each of their children to replace their existing one to get that capability, particularly when there is zero research to show that it would be any better then pencil and paper?

Re:Taking Notes on a Facebook Machine...

[Ambassador Kosh]

I doubt they will replace the ones they already have just to get that feature now. However those tablets will fail in time and need to be replaced and they might as well be replaced with something that real notes can be taken on.

I also have no idea if it is a good idea for the average student and almost certainly not in grade school.

In my engineering classes last year I had hundreds of pages of notes and the trying to keep track of all of them, work on homework and share that with other group members etc is pretty miserable with hand written notes. I am hoping the galaxy notes fixes that problem. It does have very nice recognition of math, shapes and text and the stuff I have written in it so far has worked very well.

Re:better quality?

[gweihir]

As to item 2, i do not agree on the recorded lectures. The personal presence and interaction is needed for many people to put them into the right frame of mind and often to allow them to reach the required level of concentration. Ever had your microphone fail while you were explaining a complicated construct to 200 students? In any reasonable lecture hall you can reach 200 students without PA. Now that is real concentration and focus by the students. Of course, it is taxing and it requires s strong sense in the students that their time is spent well, but I have had that experience as a lecturer several times. A recording never gets you the same. It is a bit like life music and recorded music. Life music commands attention, while recoded musing is often listened to only casually, and listening to it with full concentration takes discipline and training. Sure, some people can do it, but for the average student, the level of skill and determination needed is too high.

As to item 1, I find it just is not there yet, also because I can write very and a lot of the notes I took at university and still take today is symbolic. For other subjects, it may work.

Item 3 sounds a bit like a Wiki-like thing. I have used wikis to organize my notes when learning new things on my own, and that works pretty well. Putting a fast wiki on your computer could solve part of the issues with text-files. What I would really like is a pen-interface and display with paper-like quality (fast, > 1000 dpi, very readable), and then the structuring possibility on on top of it. Not there yet. And of course, OCR-to-LaTeX for anything symbolic.

This is why we use paper to collect data

[WillAffleckUW]

We actually have software that will allow data collection on tablets and laptops - heck, even cell phones - for observations by MDs when they do clinical workups on patients.

But - when they use it they get too caught up in the data entry and validation, and observe less than doing the same task with pen and paper on forms.

So, even though we could use electronic data capture - remember, this is clinical observation of subtle physical and psychological aspects of a patient, not stocking an Amazon delivery cart - we don't capture the raw data by electronic means, but do that after we have all the MDs and clinical research staff meet in consensus as to said observations.

Sometimes, paper and pencil are the best approach. Although I prefer pen.

Re: lectures etc

[TaoPhoenix]

Hi there.

Thanks for the reply.

The recorded lectures are a backup, not a substitute. You'll still go to the main class. But then for example the official recording is available later as a file you can play over 3 times a month later because of that hard section in the middle you just didn't get. It takes away the fear of "get it now or forever hold your peace".

Meanwhile, the Tree program is not quite a wiki, though that's not a bad model either. The main difference is the Tree program creates ordered nodes that explicitly shows the structure, so you automatically create your outline like the three items I listed, then you could chop up your reply and mine here as sub info per section. Then what happens is that each section grows on its own. It's not unlike what happens here at Slashdot, except it keeps an index pane on the left summarizing things.

Re:comp sci students taking notes vs. others?

[lpq]

I agree with the above .. note taking on a computer helped my class grades alot. Even in non-CS classes, like a French language class, I'd
spend spare time in the class (and outside) typing in the vocabulary for the following week and having it given to me on a random answer quiz that it would keep re-drilling on the wrong ones.

I had it for the main test require fill in the blank -- which means I had to get the spelling and accents correct. If I didn't get it, I was told the right answer, and later given the same question again to see if I remembered.

It worked GREAT! up until the vocab lists became longer than I could type in / week...;-(... But 1200 words+ / week was a bit much... if it had been
my only class! -- yeah those were NEW words. The test could drill me just on old words, but also had the ability to fold in words from all or selected previous weeks.

---
Also on computer -- I can do handwriting and drawing....Drawing
might be useful.. but handwriting.

My notes were always "write-only"... I had such trouble reading my own writing that it made them next to useless as a study aid.

I could touch type considerably faster than I wrote.