I remember the days in grade school science class. We’d have “notes” days. An entire hour or so of just copying down information from transparencies. I remember the pain in my right hand as I struggled to keep up with the faster writers. Pages and pages and pages of notes; it was just arbitrary labor. Looking back, I can’t believe our teachers got away with this lackadaisical method of “teaching.” What a vapid and boring way to present information. This makes me thing of modern day note taking: typing into a laptop or tablet. I’m sure students still hand write notes. So I’m interested: what’s the best way to write notes? Are notes even a valuable way to collect and retain information? Let’s take a look.
Here’s Jennifer Gonzales, writing for Cult of Pedagogy (2018):
Whether it’s taking notes from lectures (Kiewra, 2002) or from reading (Rahmani & Sadeghi, 2011; Chang & Ku, 2014), note-taking has been shown to improve student learning. In other words, if we want our students to remember more of what they learn in our classes, it’s better to have them take notes than it is to not have them take notes.
The thinking behind this is that note-taking requires effort. Rather than passively taking information in, the act of encoding the information into words or pictures forms new pathways in the brain, which stores it more firmly in long-term memory. On top of that, having the information stored in a new place gives students the opportunity to revisit it later and reinforce the learning that happened the first time around.
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Compared with writing alone, adding drawings to notes to represent concepts, terms, and relationships has a significant effect on memory and learning (Wammes, Meade, & Fernandes, 2016).
The growing popularity of sketchnoting in recent years suggests that teachers are well on their way to taking advantage of this research.
I’ve been using an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil to take notes in an emergency room for the past year. Although not an academic setting, it’s made capturing information so much more fun, engaging, and streamlined. Jennifer’s thoughts feed my interest of picking one up to aid in my studies.
Finally, if students collaborate on this revision with partners, they record even more complete notes and score higher on post-tests (Luo, Kiewra, & Samuelson, 2016).
With this in mind, it would be a good idea to plan breaks in lectures, videos, or independent reading periods to allow students to look over, add to, and revise their notes, ideally with a partner or small group. This partner work could happen after students have had time to revise their notes alone, or students might be given access to classmates for the duration of the pause.
This fits in with the Pomodoro Technique that I wrote about last week. It’s good to see some proof that collaboration with peers leads to higher scores.
This research confirms what a number of educators suspect about the negative effects of digital devices in the classroom, and some have taken it to mean they should definitely ban laptops from their lectures (Dynarski, 2017). Others argue that prohibiting laptop use robs students of the opportunity to develop metacognitive awareness of their own levels of distraction and make the appropriate adjustments (Holland, 2017).
Because technology is always changing, and because as a species, we are still adjusting to these new formats, I would hesitate to ban laptops from the classroom. Here’s why:
Research on this topic is still pretty young: Some researchers have found no significant difference in performance between paper-based and digital note-takers (Artz, Johnson, Robson, & Taengnoi, 2017). My guess is that more research will pile up and get more refined, so we should take a measured approach for the time being.
Metacognitive awareness. I’m going to use that one. Handwriting and sketching notes, even annotating onto already prepared slides on an iPad could be a great hybrid approach to note taking.
I found a summary via Clearvue Health on a 2014 Princeton Study, The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking. I found four years later that an addendum was published with some corrections. Here’s what they initially found:
Efficiency (word count): typing (310 ) wins over writing (173 words). No surprises there.
Quality (percentage of words copied): typing (12.1%) vs. writing (6.9%). “Notably, researchers did find that word overlap was negatively correlated with performance, meaning that the less overlap a student had, the better they remembered the material.
Learning (conceptual recall): typing loses to writing. “When the students were tested to see whether they remembered what they wrote down, students who wrote their notes remembered more than typing.”
Exam Performance: writing wins over typing. “When they scored the exams, they found that the students who wrote their notes tended to score better on the exam on both conceptual and factual recall.” *See first bullet below.
After the addendum, here are the corrections:
On factual-recall questions, participants performed equally well across conditions. However, on conceptual-application questions, laptop participants performed significantly worse than longhand participants.
Participants who took longhand notes and were able to study them performed significantly better than participants in any of the other conditions.
It still remains pretty clear that longhand notes are worthwhile.
“If you’re on the fence, consider writing. It’s low tech, it can be ugly for those with terrible handwriting, and it’s pretty slow. But, in the end, you may just end up learning more.”