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> Students writing by hand had to process and condense the spoken material simply to enable their pens to keep up with the lecture. Indeed, the notes of the lap

> Students writing by hand had to process and condense the spoken material simply to enable their pens to keep up with the lecture. Indeed, the notes of the laptop users more closely resembled transcripts than lecture summaries. The handwritten versions were more succinct but included the salient issues discussed in the lecture. This seems to be the key point -- when taking notes by hand, you have to think about what you're hearing and writing down. In a way, you're translating the lecturer's language to your own, and that seems to help retain the information better.

pacbard 9y ago
The other important finding is the "negative externality" of laptop use on other people that are not using it. Even if someone is taking notes on paper and the student next to him/her is using a computer, research has found negative impacts on both the student using the laptop and the student using paper (akin to second-hand smoke). I think that this is important from a policy prospective because students can make whatever choices for themselves, but the instructor should step in when those choices are impacting others' learning.
SPBS 9y ago
There's no reason why one can't type notes the same way as well, first listening and understanding before distilling that information into a few choice sentences. I find writing better because you can freely draw on your lecture notes. The benefit is twofold: one, you don't have have to slavishly transcribe everything your professor says if it's already in the slides. Two, the mental overhead is very low as your thoughts go straight from pen to paper. If you type from scratch, you end having having to 'transcribe'. If you annotate the slides on your laptop, you have to deal with the high overhead of textbox and geometric shape manipulation with a keyboard and trackpad. If my lectures didn't have so much diagrams or equations(unlikely in an engineering major), I think a purely text based notetaking software like org-mode would be pretty good.

pacbard 9y ago

The other important finding is the "negative externality" of laptop use on other people that are not using it. Even if someone is taking notes on paper and the student next to him/her is using a computer, research has found negative impacts on both the student using the laptop and the student using paper (akin to second-hand smoke). I think that this is important from a policy prospective because students can make whatever choices for themselves, but the instructor should step in when those choices are impacting others' learning.

SPBS 9y ago

There's no reason why one can't type notes the same way as well, first listening and understanding before distilling that information into a few choice sentences. I find writing better because you can freely draw on your lecture notes. The benefit is twofold: one, you don't have have to slavishly transcribe everything your professor says if it's already in the slides. Two, the mental overhead is very low as your thoughts go straight from pen to paper. If you type from scratch, you end having having to 'transcribe'. If you annotate the slides on your laptop, you have to deal with the high overhead of textbox and geometric shape manipulation with a keyboard and trackpad. If my lectures didn't have so much diagrams or equations(unlikely in an engineering major), I think a purely text based notetaking software like org-mode would be pretty good.