Note-taking: pen and paper versus the laptop

 “The Pen Is Mightier Than The Keyboard:

Advantages of Longhand over Laptop Note Taking” by Pam Mueller (Princeton University) and Daniel Oppenheimer (University of California, Los Angeles) was first published in Psychological Science in April 2014.

Participants in the study were Princeton University students and the material used was a series of TED talks.

Half of the 66 students in the study used laptops to take notes; the other half wrote their notes using pen and paper. Both sets of students were then tested on their memory for factual detail, their conceptual understanding of the material and their ability to synthesise and generalise the information.

The study found students who used laptops consistently took more notes than the “old fashioned” group. However, those students who wrote out their notes by hand using pen and paper were found, in all cases, to have a stronger conceptual understanding of the material presented to them and were a lot more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who took notes with their laptops.

What do you think? Please let us know….Richard