Research from psychology professor Karin James of Indiana University evaluated children who hadn’t yet learned to read or write. There are brain health and developmental reasons to keep writing on paper. If that sounds like you, don’t put away the pen and paper just yet! Some people prefer taking notes electronically because their handwriting has turned into illegible scrawl. Next time to you need to recall information from a lecture or meeting for more than 24 hours, consider handwriting your notes. “Taking organized notes presumably involves deeper and more thorough processing of the lecture information, whereas transcribing requires only a shallow encoding of the information,” they explained. The researchers concluded that the typing notetakers had worse recall because they weren’t actively summarizing and synthesizing key points. Psychology professors Dung Bui, Joel Myerson, and Sandra Hale at Washington University found that taking computer notes does offer the immediate benefit of better recall than well-organized, handwritten notes.īut then their research, published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, uncovered something interesting: that advantage disappears in about 24 hours.īy that point, people who typed their notes actually performed worse on tests about the material. Some notetakers argue that they’re more productive when they type because they can capture more material faster.īut without reviewing and studying those notes after an event, all of that extra transcribing doesn’t do much good. Robust recall: Handwriting makes a difference When you try to recall the information later, your brain will thank you for making its job easier.Ģ. When you really need to grasp new material, consider dusting off your trusty pen and paper. “Laptop notetakers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning,” they wrote. Mueller and Oppenheimer found that participants who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than those who took traditional paper notes. This, in turn, promotes understanding and retention. Paper notetakers’ brains are working to digest, summarize, and capture the heart of the information. If you put pen to paper, you have to be more selective in recapping key components. In a nutshell, if you type your notes, you probably tend to record lectures verbatim. Why? Because it often leads people to process information more shallowly. The three experiments they did led them to conclude that using laptops for notetaking might actually impair learning. So say researchers Pam Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel Oppenheimer of UCLA, who recently published a paper with that title in Psychological Science. Read on to learn more about three scientific links between writing out your notes by hand and actually remembering the important stuff. Writing by hand tends to boost your ability to retain information, comprehend new ideas, and be more productive - with the added bonus of eliminating the distractions of your device. More specifically, it matters whether you transcribe a speaker’s content digitally - or instead capture its essence on paper.Īs digital continues to dominate, going old-school with handwriting just might work to your advantage. It has to do with how the brain processes different inputs of information. Recent studies from psychologists and neuroscientists alike have found that handwriting is king for effective learning. Maybe you’re doing it too!Īnd why not? Typing is an incredibly efficient way to capture large amounts of information.īut if you’re looking to actually master the material, typing notes is actually is not the best way to do that. At conferences, lectures, and meetings, it’s common to see the people around you typing notes on their laptops, tablets, or phones.
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