3 ms·
The study I remember suggested that cursive increases comprehension and retention because it's slower. The theory was that because it's slower, you paraphrase,
by harshreality 9y ago
The study I remember suggested that cursive increases comprehension and retention because it's slower. The theory was that because it's slower, you paraphrase, summarize, and elide more, which engages comprehension and interpretation subsystems, rather than only exercising the speech-to-text subsystem of your brain.
It might also/alternatively be that the longer time necessary to write the information longhand keeps the information in your working memory long enough that your brain is more likely to automatically start to interpret it.
Then there's the tactile-based theory that writing letters longhand is more psychologically engaging than typing is. I'm skeptical of that, because once you learn to type you can feel when you hit the right letter, and feel when you hit the wrong letter. There's immediate tactile feedback either way, it's just different. "Did that feel like the motion I remember is correct for writing that letter" is replaced by "did that feel like my finger was in the right place for that letter when I felt that keypress". Without some good studies proving that there is a difference in cognitive effects between different kinds of tactile feedback, I think it's BS promoted by old-school teachers who refuse to deal with typed assignments.
- ouid 9y agoThere seem to be a lot of theories about why there is an effect, but is there any data to demonstrate that there is one?
- yorwba 9y agoLet me just paste the same quote I used in a comment 22 days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15506774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15506774) ------------------------------------------------------------ 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.” “It may be that longhand note takers engage in more processing than laptop note takers, thus selecting more important information to include in their notes, which enables them to study this content more efficiently,” the researchers write. http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/take-notes-by-hand-for-better-long-term-comprehension.html http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/take-notes...
- ouid 9y agosorry, I meant cursive versus print. I don't really care about laptop note takers.
- yorwba 9y agoAll the comments in the thread above you were about handwriting vs. typing. If there is a difference between different styles of handwriting, it's likely in favor of the slowest method (if the theories on note-taking and retention are correct). That would be some kind of elaborate calligraphy where each letter is adorned with vines, or something.
- ouid 9y agowhat do you mean if there is a difference? My question was not to speculate on what causes the difference, but whether or not it actually exists.