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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.'"
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 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.
If you're using Word or OpenOffice, that might be a problem. If you're using LaTeX, it's not, provided that you're a reasonably quick typist and have memorized the standard mathematical commands. I ended up typing all of my lecture notes for my statistics Ph.D. classes without much of a hassle. In fact, most of the students in my classes came to me for portions of my lecture notes, as I was able to capture all of the important comments that the professors would make in haste while continuing on with a derivation or proof.
As for a comment on the article, since very little information was given about their testing protocols there may be some inherent bias in their findings. Specifically, their testing methodology seems to hinge on showing that short-term conceptual recall rates decrease when using laptops. That is, the authors don't bother addressing long-term retention and generalization.
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
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.
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.
Goddamn Big Graphite!! I knew they were behind this.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
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.
And that BA degree was the longest seven years of your life, right?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
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.
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.
This!
As a recent engineering student, it was obvious in subjects with plenty of maths and funny looking symbols, that the only way to write things down was with a pen and paper. I just bought exercise books for the subjects where I needed to write.
Main point I wanted to make was that, you could tell that the students are engaged, when there were only one or two laptops or tablets out. If there were lots of people on some sort of computing device, then it was obvious that they weren't listening at all. Next to no one actually uses their computer for notes.
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.
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 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.
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.
If you're using Word or OpenOffice, that might be a problem. If you're using LaTeX, it's not, provided that you're a reasonably quick typist and have memorized the standard mathematical commands. I ended up typing all of my lecture notes for my statistics Ph.D. classes without much of a hassle. In fact, most of the students in my classes came to me for portions of my lecture notes, as I was able to capture all of the important comments that the professors would make in haste while continuing on with a derivation or proof.
When I read this I immediately though that this would be a trade off. The benefit you mention, against the fact that the repeatedly rewriting your notes helped you memorise them.
You needed to do this when taking written notes because the lecturers would generally fly along so fast you had to scrawl everything down just to keep up, so as soon as you got home that day (or in the break period after the lecture if their was one) you first job was to write your notes up in a more neat, organised fashion, while also making sure all the proofs made mathematical sense.
This meant that even if you did the minimum possible work you still ended up going over the same stuff at least twice to help it sink in. If you use typed notes and get everything down first time round, then you have no reason to revisit them until exam time and then you will most likely have forgotten the first going over in the lecture. Some diligent students might, but many will not.
This is one of the cases where what seems like a pointless waste of effort at the time is actually important as it is the slightly dull repetition of something that really helps it sink in to long term memory so you can recall it months later.
I dont read
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.
It must be fun to watch you at parties.
You suddenly exclaim " This! " and everyone walks away.
No brain, no pain.
No.
I use LaTeX Professionally. Moreover I use AucTex with in editor previews, split panes with docview and a heavily customised yasnippets installation made to work on Lyx-type input shortcuts. Everything is designed to speed up LaTeX document creation(Believe me I've tried it using vanilla LaTeX).
On average, it still takes me five times longer to type up a page of mathematics than to simply write it down with a pen. If there is so much as a single image, this extends to fifteen to twenty times longer -- literally.
LaTeX can very easily fool you into believing you are actually getting work done, but in reality you are simply wasting time typesetting mathematics instead of actually writing it. The only positive side to LaTeX'ed mathematics is that the equations look nice. Everything else is a huge waste of time.
May the Maths Be with you!
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!
I used to write out my physics lectures pretty much verbatim. Of course, my handwriting is awful so much of the prose was unreadable but I had better recall of what I had written down than if I didn't and equations and constants were always given a little extra attention to actually be readable.
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.