Probably very, very obvious to uni students already, but according to this study:
The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard
Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking
Pam A. Mueller1
Daniel M. Oppenheimer2
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/…
In the first study, 65 college students watched one of five TED Talks covering topics that were interesting but not common knowledge. The students, who watched the talks in small groups, were either given laptops (disconnected from Internet) or notebooks, and were told to use whatever strategy they normally used to take notes.
The students then completed three distractor tasks, including a taxing working memory task. A full 30 minutes later, they had to answer factual-recall questions (e.g., “Approximately how many years ago did the Indus civilization exist?”) and conceptual-application questions (e.g., “How do Japan and Sweden differ in their approaches to equality within their societies?”) based on the lecture they had watched.
The results revealed that while the two types of note-takers performed equally well on questions that involved recalling facts, laptop note-takers performed significantly worse on the conceptual questions.
The notes from laptop users contained more words and more verbatim overlap with the lecture, compared to the notes that were written by hand. Overall, students who took more notes performed better, but so did those who had less verbatim overlap, suggesting that the benefit of having more content is canceled out by “mindless transcription.”
Next time you find yourself bringing a laptop along to the lecture hall, resist the temptation to simply tap away on it. Bring the good ol' exercise book instead and score better on your next tests.
Interesting study. I might take a note and bookmark this to show my mates.