One of the areas I initially started looking into was whether to hand write on paper, tablet, or type notes. In fact, it was the topic of one of my very first blogs. The ultimate conclusion there was that handwriting was superior, but I didn’t necessarily compare pen and paper to pen and tablet.
I follow a TikTok channel run by two Harvard Law students and they posted a video about study tips. The first tip they mention is that you should handwrite your notes at least once (the others are find a good location to study, and get a good night’s sleep). I did some more digging here, especially at looking at the difference between writing on a tablet vs. writing in a notebook. It appears that if you’re going to handwrite, do it in a notebook. The reason is that when you are recalling this information, you will more likely remember the location on the page and size of that information. In a tablet, there is no front of the page, back of the page, etc. Also despite a hefty search function in the GoodNotes app, I forget about documents or folders I created all the time; you could have 1000 nested folders but there is no spatial awareness of scale or size on a computer or tablet. Think 10 gigabytes vs. 10 notebooks on your desk; one is much easier to grasp. The actual size of the information is lost as well with a tablet, as I am constantly zooming in and out, and resizing the window. On paper, you would remember that this topic took up half of a page.
The paper mentioned in the video, titled Paper Notebooks vs. Mobile Devices: Brain Activation Differences During Memory Retrieval was published in Frontiers of Behavioral Neuroscience in March of 2021 by researchers at the University of Tokyo. The PDF is here. The abstract states: “The significant superiority in both accuracy and activations for the Note group suggested that the use of a paper notebook promoted the acquisition of rich encoding information and/or spatial information of real papers and that this information could be utilized as effective retrieval clues, leading to higher activations in these specific regions.”
The paper also mentions retrieval processes and encoding procedures. Because on an exam, it’s all about retrieving; it just depends on how you encoded that information. There is a study I’ve heard a lot about by Mueller and Oppenheimer in 2014 that “...showed that students who took longhand notes performed better on conceptual questions than those who took notes on laptop computers.” That paper, titled The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking is here.
An excerpt from that paper is as follows: “A reasonable explanation for this interesting finding would be that the use of a paper notebook enables users to summarize and reframe information in their own words for encoding, while the use of a laptop tends to encourage them to write down information more passively (i.e., more nearly verbatim). The former processes thus naturally ensure deeper and more solid encoding via the active process of making notes. Moreover, it has been reported that longhand note-taking enhanced the performance of students on recognition of memorized words, even though typing on a computer keyboard allowed for greater speed.”
And that’s the thing, speed doesn’t really matter unless your lecturer is talking at the speed of sound, but then I’d question the purpose of the lecture in the first place. You’re not a court stenographer, you’re a student. I think likely I’ll have slides to annotate. I think I do learn the best by reading a textbook and then going to class, and from what I’ve heard from some students is that there are technically books that go along with each class, but the slides are better because the professor pulls out the pertinent information that you need for the exam. I sort of want to do as little reading as possible and get right to quizzing myself or writing a tutorial. Write, draw, record, and teach more instead of reading or typing. I think the key is that you want to push the information out, not cram it in.
The paper continues: “We hypothesized that the use of a paper notebook, together with longhand note-taking, would enhance both memory encoding and later retrieval processes that could then be investigated at the brain level. More specifically, the utilization of the paper likely enhances the processes of associating episodic (what) and spatial (where) information, especially in the hippocampus, given its well-established role in the integration of what/where/when information.”
What the paper doesn’t say, however, is if I should be taking handwritten notes during class, summarizing information afterward, or if it doesn’t matter.
In terms of comparing typed notes to tablet notes, I reference my typed notes almost exclusively (I haven’t handwritten notes on paper in my pre-med studies but plan on doing it during my physician assistant studies). I rarely go into my GoodNotes files and look for handwritten notes; they are just very messy and not well organized. So I’ve come to the conclusion that I am never handwriting notes on a tablet again, unless I’m in a lab or something.
I also have all of my textbooks on my iPad but might stop doing that. It’s been shown that reading on paper vs. a screen enhances reading comprehension. “Main findings show that students who read texts in print scored significantly better on the reading comprehension test than students who read the texts digitally” sourced from this study. So I should be printing out slides for sure and reading papers books whenever possible.
So that’s it! Just more reasons to break out the pen and paper and understand the limitations of technology.