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Here's an exchange among two of my peer learning consultants about the
study and its interpretation.
Thought I'd add a couple of student voices to the discussion.
Best,
Nic
I'm glad you pointed that out, Lindsay. I agree- there's an implicit
assumption in that statement that people who take notes on their
laptops are just passively typing everything that's said and that
people who take hand-written notes are more active in their note-
taking process. I definitely think this is a problematic assumption
since the opposite could very well be true. Examining this subject
would require keeping conscious of passive vs. active note-taking.
From my own experience, I think handwriting my notes helps me
remember things better than when I type them. I think this is for
several reasons:
It's more visual since typing is standardized and my handwriting isn't
really. I recognize my own handwriting and can remember what was
going on when I wrote something, but reading notes I typed up could
just as easily have been written by someone else so my brain doesn't
recognize it immediately.
I think the noise of the keyboard is distracting, especially in
lectures.
If I'm trying to grapple with a difficult idea or something, I can
think while writing since it helps me put my thoughts on paper and
cross things out and work through something. For example, when I'm
trying to formulate a thesis for a paper (especially major papers), I
always reach for a pad of paper and not my laptop because typing
something in feels like it should be a finished product, not something
that will require a lot of work.
There's also something in the physical act, I think. Holding a pen
puts me into a different mindset (since I usually only do this when
I'm studying or thinking about something) than when I have my laptop
out (since I could be doing anything on the laptop so it is not
necessarily a productive mindset). Maybe there's also something in
the fact that you have a physical product at the end of handwriting
(pages you can hold) rather than a screen that you just scroll.
Also, I would be curious what the relationship between learning and
recalling is since the study is focused on recall. It could be that
these two are closely linked, but I think it's something else to be
conscious of.
These are just my two cents.
Nick W.
On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 1:16 PM, Lindsay Eysenbach <[log in to unmask]
> wrote:
What this article appears to be measuring is not the act of taking
notes on a laptop versus longhand per se, but the value of different
types of notes. The types of notes taken on laptops -- verbatim notes
of what was said in lecture -- are less useful than notes taken
shorthand. I think that this is very consistent with what we believe
at McGraw -- that all aspects of learning (studying, reading, note-
taking) must be done with a purpose. Completing a task for the sake
of completing it is not the same as learning something. I think its
interesting that the authors found that notes taken by hand are more
effective, but I do not think this implies that taking notes on a
computer is necessarily worse. Rather, students should recognize that
more doesn't equal better, and should evaluate how they take notes on
computers.
Just my thoughts.
Lindsay
__________________________________
Dominic (Nic) J. Voge
[log in to unmask]
(609)258-6921
http://www.princeton.edu/mcgraw/us/
Associate Director
McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning
328C Frist Campus Center
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
Individual Appointment Times:
By request
On Apr 2, 2014, at 12:18 PM, Jered Wasburn-Moses wrote:
> I would like to share the anecdote about note-taking that led to my
> own "aha!" moment.
>
> -x-x-x-x-
> One semester, a student from one of my algebra or pre-calculus
> classes came to see me for help during office hours. He was trying
> to solve a quadratic equation; I asked him if he remembered the
> formula.
>
> "Is that the one with the plus-or-minus-square-root-of-something?"
> he asked.
>
> I affirmed that it was, and suggested that he find the exact formula
> in his notes since he couldn't remember it. He began flipping back
> and forth through his notebook in no discernible pattern. Trying to
> help him out, I looked over his shoulder.
>
> "Oh, okay, those are the notes from last Thursday, and we did the
> quadratic formula on Tuesday, so it should be right before that!" I
> said.
>
> He flipped back a few pages, didn't find it, then continued flipping
> back and forth in a seemingly-random pattern.
>
> Again I said, "They should be right before those other notes, right?"
>
> He replied: "Well, I don't really write my notes in order. I just
> open the notebook to a blank page and start there."
> -x-x-x-x-
>
> (I can hear your knowing groan now...)
>
> I spent a long time trying to understand this behavior, because it
> made no sense to me. It was actually some of my tutors who helped me
> to my epiphany. Naturally, I had assumed that students take notes in
> order to have some written record or memory aid of what occurred in
> class. But this is often not the case. Students take notes because,
> at least in high school, they got in trouble if they weren't taking
> notes!
>
> For many students, in other words, note-taking has become an end in
> itself, and not a means to some other end.
>
> This is borne out by my very non-scientific surveys since. Whenever
> I work with an individual or group of students on study skills, I
> always ask: what do you do with your notes after class? Many
> students say that they do nothing at all; most of the rest say that
> they re-read the notes sometime later (usually right before the
> test). Very few students that I've encountered engage in any "high-
> yield" study activities with their notes.
>
> Jered Wasburn-Moses
> Math Center Coordinator
> Success Skills Coordinator
> Learning Assistance Programs
> Northern Kentucky University
> http://lap.nku.edu
> University Center 170F
> (859) 572-5779
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Open Forum for Learning Assistance Professionals [mailto:[log in to unmask]
> ] On Behalf Of Milligan, Teresa
> Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2014 10:41 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Chron of Higher Education
>
> Many instructors at our college have told me that students simply
> don't take notes, and they aren't sure how to "get" them to take
> notes or see the value of them or use them, etc. I think this speaks
> to a couple of points.
>
> 1. Notes, as a topic in general, seem to be viewed as either right
> or wrong both in the content and the structure. In my view,
> electronic notes are tough for lectures, especially for struggling
> students, mostly because they don't (yet) easily allow for the on-
> the-fly structuring needed to match a speaker's thought path. If
> struggling students are afraid of doing something wrong, chances are
> they won't do it at all. We could use that ounce of preparation, as
> could our students, to scaffold for that fear.
>
> 2. Students do not seem to want to take the risk of ruling out a
> piece of information as unimportant, and then need to know it for a
> test or job. So, if they were to take notes, they'd write down
> EVERYTHING. Or, they don't take notes at all. What's more, writing
> is what we say + how we say it. Students can only last so long if
> they're struggling with both. We could do a better job of helping
> students sift information and teaching them how organize it.
>
> 3. Many of our instructors use PowerPoint for their lectures, and
> then encourage students to follow along during lectures. This is a
> great effort, but what a student might write down for notes is often
> already on the slide. We could explore how to use technology as a
> tool.
>
> 4. The issue of teaching teachers how to teach appears again! I see
> instructors too often simply ignore this and blame the student, or
> take a sort of sink-or-swim attitude; or, explicitly tell the
> students what to write down for notes. There are plenty of
> scaffolding strategies available to TEACH - not tell - students how
> to take notes without breaking from the normal curriculum. We could
> make that a part of a healthy professional development program.
>
> Whether electronic or longhand, the issues surrounding note-taking
> seem to be symptoms of a larger issue. That final quote in the
> original post - "...if the notes are taken indiscriminately or by
> mindlessly transcribing content...the benefit disappears" - hints at
> a starting point.
>
> Teresa Milligan
> Instructor, Elftmann Student Success Center Dunwoody College of
> Technology
> 818 Dunwoody Blvd.
> Minneapolis, MN 55403
> Direct: 612.381.3364
> dunwoody.edu/elftmann
>
> Let us not think of education only in terms of its costs, but rather
> in terms of the infinite potential of the human mind that can be
> realized through education.
> -John F. Kennedy
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Open Forum for Learning Assistance Professionals [mailto:[log in to unmask]
> ] On Behalf Of Larina Warnock
> Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2014 1:24 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Chron of Higher Education
>
> I find that many of my developmental students, regardless of whether
> they are using a laptop or taking longhand notes, take too many
> notes and take them on the wrong things (e.g. they write down the
> examples instead of the concepts). When they learn strategies to
> decide what they should take notes on and stop trying to write down
> everything the teacher says, grades begin to improve. Even so,
> students who take notes on a laptop also sometimes get distracted by
> the red and green lines of MSWord and try to correct their spelling
> and grammar as they type. This practice distracts them from actually
> absorbing the content. I think when we write notes longhand, we
> don't worry so much about format and we have no visible little lines
> telling us that we did something wrong. I wonder if turning off
> grammar and spell check while taking notes would alter the findings
> at all.
>
> Larina Warnock
> Developmental Studies Instructor
> WH214
> 541-917-2311
>
> We read to know we are not alone. -C.S. Lewis
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 7:02 AM, Nic Voge <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Like all experimental designs, the application to practice is
>> under-conceptualized, but this is an intriguing finding. It assumes
>> that elaborated, organized encoding happens best at the time of
>> exposure, rather than, say, after class--which is dubious--and makes
>> no account of the "life" of the notes after 30 minutes.
>>
>> Nonetheless, it speaks powerfully to docile, mindless "engagement" in
>> class.
>>
>> Best,
>> Nic
>> __________________________________
>> Dominic (Nic) J. Voge
>> [log in to unmask]
>> (609)258-6921
>> http://www.princeton.edu/mcgraw/us/
>>
>> Associate Director
>> McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning 328C Frist Campus Center
>> Princeton University Princeton, NJ 08544
>>
>> Individual Appointment Times:
>> By request
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Apr 1, 2014, at 9:49 AM, Norman Stahl wrote:
>>
>> March 28, 2014 by Danya Perez-Hernandez
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Comments (30)
>>>
>>>
>>> Taking Notes by Hand Benefits Recall, Researchers Find
>>>
>>> Distractions posed by laptops in the classroom have been a common
>>> concern, but new research suggests that even if laptops are used
>>> strictly to take notes, typing notes hinders students' academic
>>> performance compared with writing notes on paper with a pen or
>>> pencil.
>>> Daniel M. Oppenheimer, an associate professor of psychology at the
>>> University of California at Los Angeles, and Pam Mueller, a graduate
>>> student at Princeton University, studied the effects of students'
>>> note-taking preferences. Their findings will be published in a paper
>>> in Psychological Science called "The Pen Is Mightier Than the
>>> Keyboard:
>>> Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note-Taking."
>>> The researchers' goal was to figure out whether typing notes--which
>>> is becoming increasingly popular--has any direct effect on a
>>> students' ability to understand a lecture.
>>> In a series of studies, the researchers provided students with
>>> laptops or with pen and paper to take notes. (The computers were
>>> disconnected from the
>>> Internet.) Students were then tested on how well they could recall
>>> facts and apply concepts. During the first test, students were told
>>> to "use their normal classroom note-taking strategy." Some typed,
>>> and
>>> others wrote longhand. They were tested 30 minutes later.
>>> The researchers aimed to measure the increased opportunity to
>>> "mindlessly" take verbatim notes when using laptops.
>>> "Verbatim note-taking, as opposed to more selective strategies,
>>> signals less encoding of content," says the researchers' report.
>>> Although laptop users took almost twice the amount of notes as those
>>> writing longhand, they scored significantly lower in the conceptual
>>> part of the test. Both groups had similar scores on the factual
>>> test.
>>> In another part of the study, some laptop users were instructed to
>>> avoid taking verbatim notes. Instructors explained that "people who
>>> take class notes on laptops when they expect to be tested on the
>>> material later tend to transcribe what they're hearing without
>>> thinking about it much." But members of that group received lower
>>> scores in both conceptual and factual tests than did their
>>> longhand counterparts.
>>> "While more notes are beneficial, at least to a point, if the notes
>>> are taken indiscriminately or by mindlessly transcribing content, as
>>> is more likely the case on a laptop, the benefit disappears," says
>>> the report.
>>>
>>>
>>> Norman Stahl
>>> [log in to unmask]
>>>
>>>
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