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Students Remember Lectures Better Taking Notes Longhand Than Using Laptops
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Walk into any university lecture hall and you're likely to see row upon row of students sitting behind glowing laptop screens. Laptops in class have been controversial, due mostly to the many opportunities for distraction that they provide (online shopping, browsing Reddit, or playing solitaire, just to name a few). But few studies have examined how effective laptops are for the students who diligently take notes. Now Robinson Meyer writes at The Atlantic that a new study finds that people remember lectures better when they've taken handwritten notes, rather than typed ones. The research suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing. 'Our new findings suggest that even when laptops are used as intended — and not for buying things on Amazon during class — they may still be harming academic performance,' says psychological scientist Pam Mueller of Princeton University, lead author of the study. Laptop note takers' tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning. If you can type quickly enough, word-for-word transcription is possible, whereas writing by hand usually rules out capturing every word. 'We don't write longhand as fast as we type these days, but people who were typing just tended to transcribe large parts of lecture content verbatim,' says Mueller. 'The people who were taking notes on the laptops don't have to be judicious in what they write down.'"
Imagine that. And how much money did that cost? [end sarcasm]
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Try typing out the rapid fire proofs in an engineering class
So what if they do? Surely anybody who has been to university knows that you don't learn much in lectures. You learn by going to that big building nobody goes to and reading those pieces of paper that are glued together into objects called "books".
Our brains evolved to learn fine motor skills like chipping flint. Writing notes by hand engages those motor skills and that learning process. Don't just go through your book and highlight important passages - that does almost nothing. Take notes in class. Make notes on those notes when you study.
You know what worked better for me then longhand notes? No notes. Listening to the teacher instead of writing worked best for me. Turns out I recalled things better when I spent my attention listening to the teacher rather then trying to write legible notes so I could read then later.
Just goes to show that people learn differently and making blanket statements for all people gets you into trouble :)
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
I found going to class every day, even hung over, and taking notes in my own hand set me up far better than studying 10 hours for a final and trying to cram it all in.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Duh?
And yet you must have skipped the then/than lecture.
When in college, I would take copious notes during class with pen and paper. When preparing for a test, I would retype the notes over and over. Once I could type all of the notes without looking at my notebook, I felt ready to take the test. This is clearly memorization for the sake of the test, but I retained much. I also graduated with a cumulative GPA of 3.92, so I think it's fair to say my process was effective.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
I find this too.
It was a startling realization that I could take notes during a lecture, walk out and not have a clue what was being said - this is handwritten notes too.
So I gave up on notes and focused on the lecture itself, since afterall I can copy out content from a book anytime.
It's anecdotal, but some students recorded my lectures using their webcam and failed miserably with their exams. Moreover, some were very persistent in requesting the lecture syllable to be placed on Blackboard prior to the lecture, not show up for the lecture at all and afterward complain that certain exam questions weren't valid because they weren't addressed in the syllable. Yet, no matter how you take your notes, attending lectures is the least efficient way to learn. Giving lectures, on the other hand, is the most efficient way to learn. Many universities have based their teaching method, problem-based learning, on this principle
and trying to cram it all in.
Weird, I heard that not then minutes ago. Hey you wanna speak to your MOM, she's right here!
You know these people were hired by the pencil and paper manufacturers so they can keep cutting down our forests... :-)
how much do the students retain when taking notes on a galaxy note tablet?
I have a friend with a near 4.0 GPA who is like that. but he knows it doesn't seem to work for most people like it does for himself.
I often advise students to take notes longhand and then use their tablet camera to collect them, or better yet, transcribe them into a device. Yes it takes time. No you did not buy that device to save time, you bought it to communicate and organize.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I agree with the premise but disagree with the assumption about what students are doing with the notes they have typed. I could take both kinds of notes, i.e., if I understood the content I would summarize in my typewritten notes. But when I got to content I didn't understand, I could transcribe it and, later, go back and make sense of it. So what the study misses is that the transcription notes are much more useful when later trying to work through material.
I found it impossible to pay attention In any class. I skipped nearly every class and just read the books. Not always one way.
If laptops exist, shouldn't only 1 person be taking notes? Are kids this dumb?
The Zeigarnik Effect
Not only will you remember your lectures, you will have constant intrusive thoughts. So much so that you will underperform your current tasks because of the constant intrusive thoughts from remembering your lectures!
Seriously, why in the world would you want to remember everything? You only remember something until the task is done and forget about it. That is how the brain works. You only need to remember the lectures until the finals and then the brain flushes it out.
Remembering lots of stuff is like trying to fit everything into the CPU cache. Just the amount of faults will kill your performance.
Another dirty secret of universities is that professors never ever take a class in education or teaching. They are just expected to stand in front of a class and start blabbering. Most professors have very little clue about what they are doing. Most classes I have attended (or given) have a hodgepodge of the textbook content, random things that the lecturer is personally interested in and filler - stuff there is absolutely no need to remember at all. Most professors are teaching stuff that are so out of date that the only time you will ever encounter it is in books that haven't been checked out for decades. Why the hell would you want to remember this crap?
Anyone use those, these days? Harder (but not impossible) to enter that into a laptop with 'Word' or Google Docs.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Same for me too. Writing by hand always occupied too much of my attention, so I never internalized and processed what was being said very well, let alone get it down on paper in a form that would job my memory of that understanding later. If I simply didn't take notes, I tended to understand the material better, so long as I relied on other source materials to help fill in gaps in my knowledge.
Taking notes on laptops actually did work for me eventually, but only after I realized that taking them word-for-word wasn't any better than writing by hand. But because typing comes with so much less of my thought than writing (I make no claims for anyone else or the general case) and can be done much more quickly, I was much more capable of focusing on what was being said and re-expressing it quickly without having to split my attention significantly.
Many of my lectures (Computer Science) had lecture slides available before the lecture, so it was just a matter of printing them out and bringing them along. During the lecture this allowed me to largely sit and listen, and take the occasional note where the lecturer didn't stick to the slides, or was a particularly detailed discussion which the slides didn't fully cover. I found this way of teaching to be quite good.
This is in contrast to some of the mathematics units I took, where it was all longhand and furious scribbling, and not being able to take in and absorb what was actually being said. That, or my maths just isn't that strong!
People learn differently. I am like you, I learn best taking very sparse notes, mostly just following the lecture. Occasionally jotting down key equations or highlights. I almost never used my note afterwards, just a way to cement certain things in my head.
So to summarize the findings, it has fuck-all to do with the laptop and more to do with taking notes in a stupid way. Headline should read "Students remember lectures better when they take notes than when they take dictation".
I bet for their next study they can look at which is better for reading books: screens or books. And it turns out if you "read" the book by spinning the mouse wheel, you don't remember very much; amazing!
Then we can compare depth of friendship between people online versus real life. It turns out if your sole interaction is spamming each other with funny cat videos, you don't know much about their personal life; amazing!
If you had a laptop sitting there, why the hell would you be typing in notes instead of recording the entire lecture to your drive?
Personally I dont get a damned thing from lectures. Some dude speaking at me while I have no real ability to stop and ask substantiative questions is pointless. Watching a video later, or on-line so I can pause to get me questions answered via google is the the next best thing to having a tutor or being an apprentice. I guess some peoples minds just work different.
But the Profs who are zonkered out on meth and cocaine and boozed up will not remember it or anything at all ! What about them !
LOL
Ha ha
What about online video lecturers vs big classes.
What about lecturers where they just read from the book and that's it?
What about lecturers where the only real value is the grade from showing up?
Is make notes in the margins. I found my understanding went up drastically when I did that and put down my understanding of what the author was trying to get at in the margin. (Often this amounted to "I bet he's going for concept X that was in chapter 4." and at the end of the paragraph put down if I was correct or not.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
It was the same for me. Why write notes when I have a book and a copy of the notes online? Hearing it from a professor once was enough, and if I needed to refer back, there were other resources. I can understand taking notes if you plan to spend a lot of time studying since you can't keep up (spend much more time than the lecture length), but I never put in that kind of time.
The article seems a little out of whack though. They say long hand is better since its slower so you have to restate things. I can write long hand faster than I can type by a lot when it comes to the kinds of things I noted, mostly Equations, diagrams, greek letters etc. The rare times I took any notes it went way better when I had paper because it was faster (I usually didn't carry paper or pencils in college, since I generally didn't take notes). Their supposed explanation for why paper was better wasn't true at all for me, it kinda makes be doubt the study. They may have decent data, but their conclusions don't look robust.
You know what worked better for me then longhand notes? No notes. Listening to the teacher instead of writing worked best for me
I had a law professor(criminal and constitutional) that taught by example, using case law to explain what happened and why it happened as such. I still remember what he taught, and how he taught it. I don't remember shit on the provincial statues, because of the way it was taught.
Om, nomnomnom...
What if a university did mandatory recording of every lecture and posted them online? Besides forcing their professors to always be politically correct and watching what they say, what other bad things would this do? I think it could educate people who aren't even those classes. You could even post them for people to listen who don't even go to your college. But would this shoot colleges in the foot? Would people continue to pay for secondary education if everything was available for free online?
God spoke to me
This is basic knowledge, they made me do this in school to help better remember details. It's something that still do off and on to this day. But I learned how to remember things without having to physically write it down. It's basic psychology. Another article to fill to the /. pages that should be filed under DUH!
In fact this is either a lack of focus or someone who figures that they can find it all out later on. In the age of internet everyone figures they can just cheat their way thru everything, or learn a subject they should've been paying attention to.
I found that writing long or shorthand dampened my learning experience.
However, I'm pretty sure I'm an edge case. I had years of experience at call centers prior.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
What about lecturers where the only real value is the grade from showing up?
That kinda answers itself, doesn't it?
I am not a crackpot.
I learned best by skipping the lecture altogether and reading the book. Then I wouldn't get sleepy listening to all the stupid questions from people that weren't paying attention.
You know what works even better? Reading the day's material before lecture. My calc-based-stat(*) prof (Dr. Green == best prof ever) made us do this; he always assigned at least one homework problem from the next day's lecture. I started doing this in my other classes, and it was like I entered a cheat code that put college into easy mode. I wish I had known about that trick when I was a freshman.
* calc-based-stat = the senior-level stat class for math and science majors with multivariate calculus proofs, not the freshman class that every pre-med student takes.
I found going to class every day, even hung over
That probably helped, considering you didn't have all those pesky short-term memories from the night before getting in the way of what you're hearing at the moment.
From early childhood to my Phd degree, I was instructed to take copious notes. Turns out all classroom notes I took throughout my life were never needed. With the benefit of hindsight, its better to mentally focus on lectures and refrain from notetaking!
No shit Sherlock, lol.
I HAD been a no-notes guy for many years, and then I realized that if I wasn't wiggling my arm and fingers while getting the symbolic information, it was going to be that much harder to get my fingers and arm to wiggle with while regurgitating the symbols. Now I pay attention and I wiggle my fingers and arm in tandem. I'd like to thank the association.
I took notes because of the "just in case" feeling I'd get otherwise, but in retrospect I probably should've done just this. I almost never came back to the notes, so all I ended up with was a large amount of (usually unintelligible) scribbling that'd sleep on my desk until the end of the semester. It's also why the courses where all the notes were available online were my favorites, as then I didn't feel compelled to take notes and could instead just listen.
And this is the key in working with any population.
Some people don't need notes.
Some need anchor notes
Some need to read the book ahead of time and ask questions.
And some need to type things down because they can't write fast enough and miss portions of the lecture.
And some use digitial recorders.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
You know what worked better for me then longhand notes? No notes. Listening to the teacher instead of writing worked best for me. Turns out I recalled things better when I spent my attention listening to the teacher rather then trying to write legible notes so I could read then later.
Just goes to show that people learn differently and making blanket statements for all people gets you into trouble :)
Min
You were doing it wrong. You write nearly illegible notes that take a long time to decipher later, and in the process develop recall.
Yep, I was the same way. Taking notes distracted me from concentrating on the lecture at hand. The textbooks and handouts were always there to review the material if I wanted, but I discovered that I had a very high retention rate of the information presented when I simply listened and concentrated on what I was being said.
The whole "you must take notes as you listen to the lecture" mentality is horrible advice for people like me who can't multi-task. It was only very late in my schooling that I finally figure this out.
Far too often people make the mistake of thinking that if a learning process worked for them, then it surely must work equally well for everyone. Granted, I'd bet that taking notes works pretty good for most students, but I guess people like us are outliers.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I know that for me, sitting in the back of the classroom playing minesweeper actually helped me pay closer attention to the lecture. In fact, I was usually the only one in the class paying enough attention to be able to answer questions. For some reason, I am able to stay more focused when I have 2 tasks occupying my mind. If there's only one thing I'm trying to focus on, my mind tends to wander. Similarly, I find listening to audiobooks and/or podcasts not only helps me stay awake and alert on long car drives, but driving also improves my retention of the content.
That sounds about right.
I always took complete notes, by hand, until I got a laptop in second-year and started typing up the complete notes in LaTeX.
I think that typing worked better than writing, but only because I was doing a verbatim copy of board information and the tex files could be grepped, after-the-fact. I can also type with my eyes closed and I wasn't getting much sleep, in those days.
The friends of mine who just sat in class and listened seemed to understand the content much better (they just needed to be sure to discuss the content or do the assignment before it fell from memory as unreachable information).
...and some people spend lecture time at the Pool Table and prefer to learn from the books and Tutorials.
Cheers, Chris
It's pretty much going to happen anyway, not every academic can be tenured or make a career out of it. The only things that couldn't really be done online are lab work and exams.
So, let me get this straight. You get the professors to repeatedly deliver a long winded lecture to a room full of students. Each student must record important bits of the lecture as notes. Then you assign work for them to do on their own and gague the degree of their inability to cope with the most moronic "learning program" in the universe? Dumb.
Take a step back for a second, look at the big picture, and THINK. You have technology now, USE it. Wouldn't it be better to Record a good lecture by the professor once, (update recording on changes, to include clarifications or additional info if needed)? Then you can assign each student to watch the lecture on their own time thus decentralizing the primary training set consumption. The students can pause, rewind, etc. and write down any questions they have about answering some example questions at the lecture end. Then the Professor and Students meet to DISCUSS the Lecture they already consumed and clarify any questions, aiming to work out any misunderstandings BEFORE you assign them a task to gauge the degree of knowledge they have now learned?
It's like you're purposefully trying not to divide information over space-time properly. It's fucking Pathetic, and you should be ashamed.
The idea is not to write down what the lecturer says as fast as possible, but rather to pay attention to what they are saying, think about it briefly, rephrase it in your mind, and write down a brief summary note about the point that was made. Sure you have to write down formulas and equations accurately, but that's not "taking notes" -- it's copying from the board/overhead/projector.
When it came time to study, I'd rewrite and condense my notes even further.
By the time I got the notes for a semester class down to a few pages of tightly cribbed notes and shorthand, I had the material down more than well enough to pass the exam. Because I'd thought and rethought about it, not because I'd mindlessly copied material.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Recording lectures verbatim and rewatching them rather than jotting notes down live is better yet. You can jot notes down ad infinitum if you have the lecture recorded
Obviously because writing involves the kinesthetic as well as auditory learning. The rule is is that you don't konw what you hear or see, but only what you DO. Writing (not typing) is DOING something with the knowledge, and that's what's remembered.
Cranky educator.
No, he missed the "them" class. But someone missed the grammar class, perhaps...
I noticed this 20 years ago, when students who faithfully transcribed notes in class on their (super-expensive) portable computers usually ended up dropping out of EE/ME/etc. and into "Engineering Management," the home for those who couldn't hack an engineering (or straight science) degree.
They had futures either as court stenographers, or as PHBs.
Pre-laptop student here. I took copious handwritten notes and found that they were a huge distraction from the lecture! The note-taking thing, I eventually learned, could be a crutch and a sign of unease with the material and lack of confidence in myself. I was paranoid that I would "miss something" and scrambled to transcribe every little thing.
Hugely wasteful. And the U. I was at did nothing, literally nothing to talk to students about these issues.
I find that I learn and seek to retain information better when I have a physical real world object; whether it is from my own notes or reading a "physical" book I purchased on the interwebs/bookstore. I seem to recall pages better with the real world copy, visually in my mind. Flicking pages is a breeze and being able to use my fingers as book marks further helps me to flick quickly, also stickies and highlighters.
I have tried digital media extensively, and I find it is great for pulp.
Uh, what?
"You know what worked better for me then longhand notes?"
Should be
"You know what worked better for me them longhand notes?" according to your grammar?
Indeed. In one of my first college courses we were permitted to take notes in the (very small) margin of the text itself. This led to focus on the instructor and very small amounts of note taking.
In High School I took more notes and learned less.
The best situation was where I took little or not notes, but paid one of the transcribers for the hearing impaired for their professional notes (in those dark days before professors provided pointers to their web page ;>). I focused on the lecture, and a professional took notes. I wound up not using the professional notes all that much (usually it repeated things in the text book ... but for the one time in a hundred that material wasn't in the textbook AND was on the test ... it was invaluable ;>).
The other "trick" was to write notes immediately *after* class. While precise dates and fiddly facts weren't recorded, the overall structure of the lecture and the immediate impressions I formed were there for the recording. This has proved useful in the many years since ... recording the gist of discussions (if I can't remember it 10 minutes after the meeting, it probably wasn't terribly important) ... and sending them out as minutes (soliciting corrections from attendees) is usually far more effective than recording and ignoring the mp3 when trying to figure out at what meeting we went down the wrong algorithmic path ;>
Just remember to...
Listen carefully, math on tape is hard to follow.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I went through four years of engineering uni without taking one single note, graduated with a 3.5+. Have to admit I threw off a few lecturers with the intensity of my attention though.
The point is not to write notes you can read later, the point is to involve the fine motor system of your brain.
The learning process is the writing, not the reading.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
That's because the current corporate (MS, Apple etc) friendly version of Slashdot is just so numbingly banal all the real commenters have left. It's mostly just an echo chamber of SMM sockpuppets now.
UNSW actually is trying to do this, but so far it seems very opt-in. If you use overhead projectors then it doesn't go into the recording.
I suspect they are allowing the system to be way too cooperative with the lecturers where it should probably be a little more adversarial - ensure nothing used to present in that room isn't recorded.
What if a university did mandatory recording of every lecture and posted them online?
Can't post them online without permission from the presentor, due to their copyright.
Some professors have even gone so far as to force students to turn in all their notes at the end of the semester, for destruction, and file lawsuits against professional notetakers.
Monash University records the vast majority of lectures online, and has done for many years. A useful resource if you cannot make a lecture due to illness.
"Laptop note takers' tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning. If you can type quickly enough, word-for-word transcription is possible, whereas writing by hand usually rules out capturing every word."
So the problem is that laptop users have bad note taking skills, not that laptops cause students to remember less... (Or rather people have bad note taking skills and it's easier to take bad notes on a laptop)
null
My university does this (records sound and computer screens so not always useful), a very small number of lecturers turn it off. It is good for catching up or reviewing a topic, but I tend to find that the face to face lecturers allow me to learn better. (And I take notes on my laptop)
One of my lecturers has gone further and recorded all of his lecturers with videos, it allows the course to cover more content as the pre-recorded lectures don't take up class time where extension lecturers and some repeat content is provided.
null
No, they're just being cheap by not installing cameras in every lecture theatre. I've yet to have any lecturers who has turned the system off though.
null
"The research suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing."
And all along we were told we were shallow if we 'type one handed'. The browser tab or two with, ahem, visual materials were for, you know, facilitating unimpaired processing. I can't see that flying in the Dean's office.
I wonder how well they'll be able to remember, if instead of using a laptop to take notes, they use their laptop to recorded and auto-transcribe it, so it can be replayed over and over. So that any parts that cause confusion can be examined until understood, without worrying about missing the next part. Where, with a press of a button, a user can mark the clip with a note; "important part here" or "come back to this, it's confusing" or even "prof says this will be on the test".
Besides, what a stupid study. There are certain classes where 'remembering' is the most important part of the class, but at least in my engineering and science classes, 'knowing' and 'understanding' had slightly higher priority. I can easily remember the last thing I was expected to memorize, with no other expectations - in 7'th grade, US History, I was expected to memorize each president's name and their start & end dates in office, in years. Completely useless.
Is that a laudable goal to test against for college students? That they're being judged at the 7'th grade level?
I recall several of them did not like it if I asked pertinent questions, such as pointing out a flaw in a checksum algorithm while the dude was mid-flow explaining its innards like it was God's word on CRC. On the plus side the food there was excellent and the labs were open until well after sunset.
No.
Everyone is equal and learns in exactly the same way.
No one is different.
No one has an easier time learning something than anyone else.
We must have perfectly equal distributions of all types of people in every field of study.
Damn.
They let you graduate with a grade that low?
Must be a pretty shitty university. I graduated with an 8.
Well, they have done extensive studies which show that people learn much better when they take notes. It is possible you are an exception to this rule. However, I think it likely that the problem was that you spent time trying to write legible notes. The studies about taking notes did not say that actually reading the notes was necessary for the improved learning (actually, they showed that just taking the notes improved learning, without ever looking at them again).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
in pretty much all of my lectures, we were given a printed copy of the slides (3 to a page or so) at the beginning of each lecture and that worked very well as we could annotate on the sheets the explanations, additional notes etc rather than try and write the entire lecture. I'd hate to type out the lecture as diagrams would just take too long and I find I recall pictures better and having the slides printed made me recall those images easier.
I did take notes too. Usually very short ones. Mostly stuff like references to some specific books etc. Or important keyword type of things so I had a starting point after the lectures. What you should do is find the right way for yourself to study and learn. It might differ a lot from anybody elses. I also frequently skipped lectures alltogether, and just studied the things my self. This was for two different reasons. Some lecturers went ahead so slow I got bored, and started to pay attention to everything else around me, including my laptop. Some lecturers went ahead so fast I couldn't keep up, and was just wondering how did we get here, and wtf is the lecturer talking about. Waste of time in both cases.
And one more note. If your university class has required attendance to lectures you are not in a uni, but in a daycare for grownups. It should be about learning, not about sitting on your ass in some specific spot at some specific time.
What if the lectures were videotaped and we could watch them over and over again? We would still take notes but only to summarize the important things in the lecture. Universities that offer MOOC style video lectures along with real classroom lectures will win.
I am the exact same way. I think it annoyed other students that I was able to do so well without taking any notes. The downside of this method is that I often fell asleep in class if I was too tired and it was a particularly boring lecture.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
This study deserves a place in the well-known "Journal of Irreproducible Results"
It's also possible that he took classes that actually challenged him. At any rate, people with the highest grades are not necessarily the most intelligent, the most skilled, or the most knowledgeable.
I tend not to take notes at all during class/lectures. The material is not unique - there are plenty of other sources for that information. The point about attending is to have someone explain stuff to you in a way that makes it easy to comprehend. The best way to make use of that exposition is to pay attention and make sure you understand what's being said, asking questions if necessary.
Make notes later.
Contemporaneous note taking is for situations where the information that is is only available from that source and needs to be accurately recorded. Examples include doing an experiment where you need at accurate record of what was done, or taking a statement from a witness.
Ditto what Minulpa said.
Ease of handwriting is personal. Some people, like me, require intense focus to write longhand legibly. Thst means shutting out hearing what is going on while I write.
The correct answer is longhand for some, keyboards for others, and no notes for still others. Averages are as useless as an average bra size for women.
I had a teacher who didn't allow you to take notes in his class ... because it was all in the book.
Of course, he wrote the book, and his 'teaching' was him copying examples from the book onto the overhead machine each class. If you couldn't follow along in class, you couldn't get a different take from reading the book, as it was THE EXACT SAME THING.
But not taking notes in class meant that I fell asleep 10-15 min into each class. I also recall things by remembering where on the page I wrote things (top, left side, in green ink). I also make notes on how excited a teacher seems about an idea, if they spend a lot of time on a topic, or if they specifically say 'this will be on the test' ... so I have something to skim through before the test. (and then try to decrypt what my chicken scratch of hand writing actually says)
Maybe listening and not writing is better for remembering things (as the professor claimed), but not if you can't stay awake through lectures on fluid dynamics & beam mechanics. And it also leaves you nothing to review before the tests and/or to share with friends who might've been sick and missed a class. (or for you to borrow from them)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Yep, but I'm dysgraphic, so anything involving my fine motor system is a cognitive, rather then an associative task, as it probably is for you. E.g. writing requires cognitive processing for me as opposed to happening as an 'automatic' background task as it likely does for you.
Thus my point about the danger of making sweeping statements for 'students'. We all learn differently, so making decisions based on this sort of study is treacherous ground.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
In point of fact I scored a 4.0 in English class, and technical writing. After that I spent 20 years in the school of working for a living. The first two taught me correct diction, grammar, and proofreading skills. The latter taught me that there was a time and place for perfection, and a time and place for writing quickly with enough accuracy to get a point across. No one pays me to write Slashdot comments, so it falls into the second category.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Many of us have by our own admission terrible handwriting, and have trouble reading our own notes. (And this is going to be more and more of a problem as some quarters continue viewing cursive handwriting as archaic and not worth the time needed to teach it.) Also, my paper notebook doesn't have a search function.
For many classes I would take notes on my laptop in a continuous excel spreadsheet, then re-read and annotate them with material from the book, off the internet, etc. It worked quite well.
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Why take notes and come to the class at all when you can have the entire thing emailed to you?
A) People learn by doing
B) Old dogs don't learn new tricks
C) Experience counts.
Like, I'd be a lot more concerned about the people who go to University to be a Doctor, and don't take notes. Lawyers and Comp Sci, the field changes faster than anyone could learn in the time they spent there.
This definitely works when the teacher provides lecture notes to reference later.
I used to work with a handwriting expert to, ironically, develop a handwriting training system on a computer.
Anyway, he used to quote studies that showed writing by hand (this was the early 1990s) gave you language skills you never developed growing up typing.
Losing that may be a bigger and more risky experiment than we realize at this time.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
You know what worked better for me then longhand notes? No notes. Listening to the teacher instead of writing worked best for me. Turns out I recalled things better when I spent my attention listening to the teacher rather then trying to write legible notes so I could read then later.
Just goes to show that people learn differently and making blanket statements for all people gets you into trouble :)
Min
Doodling usually worked best for me. If I am not doing something with my hands then my mind starts moving onto other things and I completely lose track of the lecture. Though I will say that I found the laptop to be quite nice. I could type notes fast enough that I could almost do a word for word transcription of the teacher's lecture. I didn't do that. I would listen, and "doodle" on the trackpad (just move the mouse cursor in circles) and then quickly type what important bit I wanted to remember from the lecture. This never worked in math or science classes, however.
I must admit that I find this also to be the case for taking notes in meetings at work as well... or at least it applies to me...
WTG?
To quote The Hilliary, "What [fucking] difference does it make?"
I use pen and paper, pencil and paper, tape recorders, PDAs, laptops, cameras. I don't remember any lecture that I took notes of.
The lectures that I remember are those that I remember with my mind apart from my hand.
Notes are for tests; memory is for life.
And let's not forget 3 other tiny variables -- "who's doing the teaching", "what is being taught", and "how it's being taught." Different tools for different situations. Math class is different from history class is different from philosophy class. (Hell, even different types of math are different enough to warrant different approaches.) There were times I'd take 2 pages of dense notes in a class, and other times I'd write nothing but the date, the topic, and 2 or 3 key or interesting points.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
+1 for doodling. I remember a slashdot article some time back that said people doodle to keep their minds occupied, since the lecture itself was simply not intellectually stimulating enough to require their full attention, and that it actually *helped* learning because it stopped them from dozing of or just completely losing concentration. I remember sitting and paying full attention for some of the more interesting classes, like advanced data structures, or chemistry. But for "How to write a resume and do a job interview" class (this was *required* for all CS students), yeah, I was doing a LOT of doodling.
This is quite true. Many years ago, when getting an amateur radio license meant a visit to an FCC office, I was close to the limit of my writing speed taking down 13 wpm code for the General license. Those who needed to pass the 20 wpm test for Extra, I was told, had to use a keyboard.
Today, I can probably hit bursts of 50 wpm typing, but I doubt I can write legibly faster than 10 wpm or about a character a second. If I'm taking notes in class, the latter forcing me to be engaged with what the professor is saying and taking down only the essence. I can't simply sit there almost mindless typing away.
There are several schemes that can make handwritten note-taking more effective. One's called Cornell Notes.
http://coe.jmu.edu/learningtoolbox/cornellnotes.html
Check that and the others out if you're looking for a relatively effortless way to boost your grades.
I've always understood that taking notes forced your brain to take something short term memory and push it into longer term memory by processing what you're hearing into the written word.
I have a stack of composition notebooks (the black and white bound ones from college) that date back over 20 years filled with my business notes. It's cheap, but it's thorough and nothing says "paying attention" like physically writing it down. I also tape business cards onto the page where I made the notes on that meeting.
I am Homer of Borg, resistance is - Ooo Donuts!
Get a livescribe pen. You can take your own longhand notes, and if you had it set to record, you can listen to the lecture again (or the parts that your own notes weren't clear (assuming that your notes were the problem, and not the lecturer).)
Only has to be legible to you. Avg vocab is a few k words.
Even my fastest sloppiest writing is able to provide enough unique shapes to be read by me.
Legibility is writing for other people.
Capturing the ideas with quickly drawn glyphs is note taking.
I thought this effect had been well-known for many years. It's basic psychology.
What about Q&A sessions following the lecture? If you are not present, you don't get the oportunity to have the instructor clarify some points. Even using some sort of messaging or discussion board, the issues are not as clear in your head as immediately following the lecture. Good lecturers can gauge the mood of their audience (class) and adjust their delivery to reinforce confusing points if they sense comprehension problems. Some even take questions in mid lecture.
And then there's the really bad professors who won't even take questions from the class. I had one in an EE class that would turn his back on the class, scribbling equations on the board for an hour. Halfway through one lecure, he got a sign wrong and continued on, muttering to a few students with questions to hold them until the end of the lecure. Half an hour later, his results were not correct and he just stood there looking back for his mistake.
Have gnu, will travel.
Waconia Public High School - where my kids go - issued ipads to all the students starting with a certain grade.
Now, a year or so on, my student WANTED to take notes longhand, as they felt that they learned the material better in that way. The teacher actually PREVENTED this student from doing so, claiming that "all the notes needed were coming to her ipad" and that the school's recommended policy is for students to then take their ipads home, and manually copy the notes in longhand there to improve retention.
Seriously.
-Styopa
...I would still take notes by hand. I can't quite type fast enough, especially not anything mathematically heavy. (That, and during my attempts at transcription, my brain pops into a "throughput mode", and if I miss something or make an error I have a hard time catching back up.) One change I would make, is that I would probably supplement my notes with digital photos.
One last thing... I'm presuming by "longhand" TFA just means "handwritten". Longhand usually means "cursive" in my area, which is slower than both my typing and my "chicken-scratch" printing.
wait till your 50! Cleaning up MFM parts. . .
Yeah it's on paper, some on old word perfect / DOS
it's in books, diaries, etc.
My advice is fsck the university advice, just take notes in CLASS with paper pencil/straight edge, I always thought electronic communications devices in class were annoying, except actual test equipment, then ya transcribe them to your kit when your not burned out. Burned out means you found your niche.
But, with university as part topic, I have to say is it even worth it? Why not just do business to begin with?
The whole school system is a fraud.
What good does taking microprocessors do when they're beyond your comprehension in the real world?
It has been known for hundreds, nay, thousands of years that involving more of the body in learning increases retention and understanding.
Insecure employees are the best. They never rest on their laurels, and always tend to find their own bugs or other defects. All things else being equal, I'll take someone who's insecure any day.
*headdesk*
Man, I wish that all of my students were as smart as you. I assign them reading from the text prior to lecture, and give them problem sets to work on ahead of time. I encourage them every day to do the work before class (the reading and exercises). And then on my evaluations I get dinged for assigning problems that the students don't know how to do, because we haven't covered them in lecture yet. THAT WAS THE POINT!
The headdesk, by the way, is not for you, but for my students.
Rhapsody in Numbers
I remember being taught that.....back in the day, at a study skills workshop my campus counseling center sponsored.
The recommended taking thorough book notes before the lecture, then going to the lecture with questions about the material, using the lecture as a time to think about the material.
The article makes sense to me.
It does seem to require more "processing" to take notes by hand than type it all in.
My trouble in school always was that my handwriting was not all that great and some of my notes later on were slightly less useful. It would have been nice to have the notes typed on the spot.
Maybe the answer is to learn shorthand.
Even now, years out of school, when I start a new job I have to take notes.......and fast, and what I have left is sloppy and incomplete.
I have no idea how much effort is required to learn shorthand though.
While the headline makes a sweeping statement, the research is statistical in nature. Essentially, if you are an average student (I don't know how they selected or segregated their sample, but one assumes that they outline their methodology in the paper---my institution does not subscribe to [i]Psychological Science[/i], so all I can see is the abstract), you are more likely to do well if you take notes longhand rather than with a computer. In terms of your anecdotal evidence, the study is mute, as it doesn't seem to consider any kind of disability, nor does it address those that take no notes.
Rhapsody in Numbers
With technology, there is no need to take verbatim notes. The teacher/professor can just upload his powerpoint slides and a video of the whole lecture to the web.
The problem it seems is that notes serve 2 different purposes. #1 Make an accurate record of the lecture contents, #2 Distill the lecture information in a way that will help you remember/understand key points. #2 Can lose a lot of information, and I know I myself am guilty of distilling lectures to the point of missing some key points. I think the reason people take verbatim notes, is because they are worried that their distilling process is not perfect.
People are making a tradeoff between learning the material quickly (i.e. concentrating on the lecture) but risk losing some information, and capturing all the material (i.e. taking exhaustive notes) for later review at the expense of loss of concentration during the lecture. This provides the benefit of potentially learning everything but with the cost of learning it more slowly.
If we completely remove the need to make an accurate recordings of the lecture (#1), by simply providing these, then we are free to concentrate on #2 or not even taking any notes and just listening intently. It's ok if you miss things because you can always just rewatch the video or look at the slides.
I was the same way. I hardly ever took notes, I guess I wasn't a perfect student, but I found that if I took lots of notes in class I would do much worse, I would spend all my energy on writing it down and trying to keep up with what was being said, my attention divided, learning less of everything. Instead I just like to listen and focus, and if I really wanted to remember it, write a summary after.
For stuff I had to work through like math and CS I would write it down. Also when starting a new program or piece of one I like to do the psudo code on a piece of paper as that helps me focus, which might be in this case the information is coming from my head rather than an external source. It also makes arrows and boxes instantly available unlike on the computer. Can't wait till I have a low latency tablet and pen though, would throw out the paper immediately.
The worse was getting punished often for not taking notes, teachers would grade them or assume I wasn't paying attention if not copying information down.
I remember one year in college I decided to try to be more than a B student and did everything 'right'. I sat in front, aggressively tried to answer questions, I took copious notes, did homework immediately rather than procrastinating, pretty much tried to be the model student we are asked to be. That semester I pulled my first D average when I had rode the C through A grades my whole life (based on interest in the subject).
Did I ever mention that I hated school?
Truthfully school isn't about learning, it is a game where you try to figure out the system a teacher employs to determine the material on the test, a game to manipulate faculty members into liking you enough to offer extra credit and special exceptions for failings, and ultimately tailoring your school 'resume' well enough facilitate you into whatever job or school you want to move to next.
I made the mistake in assuming academia was about learning and fairness above everything else while I made my way through it. It is a mistake I won't let my children make for very long as they soon enter the great beast of our education system.
Pam Mueller of Jeopardy! fame!
BULLSHIT.
Pure, unadulterated bullshit.
I'm sorry, taking notes longhand for me is an exercise in self torture. If I try (and I haven't tried since junior high school, I got a laptop in high school to end that stupidity) I have moderate to severe pain in my hand, unreadable notes, and no memory at all whatsoever of the lecture.
With a laptop, I can reasonable notes, meaning a few key words or phrases to jog my memory of what the lecture was about. I don't bother with a word-for-word transcription, if I wanted that I'd turn on audio recording. With a laptop, I can listen to and look at what's going on with the lecture, I don't have to stare at the paper to make sure I'm staying close to the lines.
As I've said for years now, if it's worth writing down, it's worth NOT writing it on paper.
It's not the actual notes that makes a big difference, but what you do with those notes. Most students just take notes and that is the extent of the usefulness of their notes. A much smaller number (I imagine) actually make use of those notes. I cannot count the number of times students come into office hours and, when asked if they refer to their notes, say "no." Regarding those who think LaTeX/TeX is a longer process than taking notes. I took notes on my laptop in grad school for almost all my classes. Diagrams are easily done by drawing them (as a sketch) either on paper or a simple graphics editor to be made nicer when going back to review my notes (see paragraph above). It is much easier to type in one's own words an explanation of what is written on the board (which is often a professor's shorthand) than it is to write it out by hand. As for copying verbatim, typing (even in LaTeX) can still beat out handwriting when it comes to formulas. Lastly, when typing up notes (and done correctly), one can easily review (on the spot) the notes taken (esp. if using LaTeX/TeX) since each few lines of tex can be previewed with a few keystrokes.
One of my college professors made us to put away notebooks and everything. He said: "Don't distract yourself by taking notes, play attention, focus on understanding, EVERYTHING you're seeing on the black(white)board is on your textbook." It really worked well. The class subject was: "Electricity and Magnetism"
Some of us students quite literally need to type. Lately we have been able to blend in thanks to the popularity of laptops. We no longer have to go through disability offices, etc. for accommodation. I grew up with that shit in K-12, well, 4-12. It's not a choice. I need my laptop. You have no idea how much I would like to escape it.
As for integrating your own thoughts while taking some notes? Here's a crazy idea, why not make that the focus? Why not try to find a way to get people to actually do that while they're typing rather than scurrying back to a computer-less world like a digital Luddite?
I mean there are advantages being thrown away aside from those of us without a choice being able to blend, for example an aware student can have their notes accessible to them on every Internet connected device on the planet and immune to loss.
Are you no longer capable of teaching? Are you not willing to emphasize the need to process?
On my notes one would find what was said, what was on the slides, photos and/or drawings of drawings made on the board or specimens shown, and my thoughts on all of this. My thoughts tend to include what studies, other chapters, etc. or even silly things like xkcd comics that I'm reminded of during.
Get your students to do this. Get you students to actually use the technology before them!
For me, I forget easily so I need something recorded. Same for taking notes. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
They don't have the proper implants.
http://www.lucidprose.com/samp_teaching.html
Download the notes, and concentrate on what the lecturer is saying, rather than writing and probably missing half.
What you say, I'm pretty sure, is similar to what was proven a long time ago. That the best way to take notes was to go to the lecture, not write anything, and then after the lecture write your notes from memory.
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
Understood, and agreed in so far as everything you wrote is concerned. My (unwritten) assertion, which is probably obvious to someone who understands that the research is about statistical medians, is that it would be dangerous to extrapolate from the study's conclusions that it would be appropriate to mandate a particular note taking style (e.g. "No laptops") because you would likely be doing a disservice to a portion of your student population who is not the 'average' student.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
While I can't remember most of my high school biology from the notes I took in class I can remember playing FFVII on my laptop during lectures quite clearly!
I'm honest enough to admit I lie to myself.
Everything I write down I forget, because I know it's written down.
It's better to go into class knowing that you have to pay attention.