Take note of this new research
Summer is almost over. The air is cooler these days, and the evening sky darkens earlier. The last few days at the beach or camping in the woods have been savoured. Soon, the pace of life will quicken. Freshly-painted classrooms in schools, colleges and universities will be filled with students and teachers.
The beginning of another school year is filled with the promise of a new start. This is the year, we vow, that all classes will be attended, notes will be carefully taken, assignments turned in on time. Our grades will be better, too.
If this sounds like a familiar refrain, try changing up your routine with this unusual suggestion: Our grades will indeed be better, if we leave our laptops closed, and take lecture notes instead with old-fashioned pen and paper.
Certainly, it is faster for today’s students to type than to write by hand. But more speed doesn’t always lead to more achievement. A new study published in Psychological Science, by Pam Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel Oppenheimer of University of California at Los Angeles, offers the interesting discovery that notes taken by hand are more beneficial to learning.
The findings indicate that students who typed their notes tried to take as much verbatim from the lecture as they could. These students didn’t discriminate between the major statement and the detailed example. But those who wrote by hand were forced to be more selective, because they couldn’t possibly get everything down. So these students processed the material mentally as they wrote, choosing the most important points. They might summarize, or even draw a map of the concept being introduced.
The scientists compared notes taken by two groups of students: the typists and those who hand-wrote. The two groups performed equally well when it came to remembering facts such as a date. But when asked about concepts — such as how two countries differ in their approaches to achieving equality in society — those who took hand-written notes did better, hands down.
There’s another benefit, too. For laptop users, it’s sometimes too easy to entertain oneself with social media if the lecture takes a turn for the dull. If you are limited to a paper-and-pencil scenario, you can avoid those temptations.
The researchers don’t expect a rush to buy ball-point pens and spiral notebooks. It’s a hard sell to get some students back to the outdated tools of pen and paper. But they are hopeful that various tools, like new stylus and tablet technologies, can offer the best of both worlds. Now, the only remaining obstacle is remembering that almost-extinct skill of handwriting itself. What was once old will become new again.