Notetaking the "write" way

Old fashioned handwritten notes give kids the best chance to learn.

Originally published in the Moultrie News.

I’ve asked my son’s teachers to let him use his laptop to take notes instead of writing them down by hand. He does way better on his computer and gets distracted too much with writing notes by hand. But most of them have said no. Why can’t kids just use their computers to take notes?

It could be that teachers view a singular student click-clacking on a laptop while everyone else labors by hand to be an unnecessary distraction. But it’s more likely they realize laptops are a drastically inferior way of taking notes.

The general idea behind notetaking is to learn new information, right? Students write down key particulars so they can review them later, recalling what the teacher (text, film, etc.) taught them.

Okay, so which medium — notepad or laptop — is better at accomplishing that goal? Scientific studies say it’s old-fashioned pen and paper. Common sense and experience agree.

The most prominent research on the issue is presented in a 2014 article called “The Pen Is Mightier than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking,’’ published in the journal Psychological Science. It analyzes three studies where students used various note-taking methods before being tested on their retention of the material.

Laptoppers scored lower than handwriters even though laptoppers generally created nearly word-for-word accounts of the lessons. The handwriters even lapped the laptoppers when students had a full week to study their notes. The results not only led the report’s Princeton and UCLA authors to claim that handwriting afforded a learning advantage over laptops; they even went so far as to assert that laptops “may be doing more harm in classrooms than good.”

Researchers hypothesized that handwriters may process information better as it comes in because they have to condense what they write down. With the days of shorthand long gone, handwriters can’t take down lessons verbatim. They have to discriminate between what to keep and what to disregard. Laptoppers, on the other hand, can easily transcribe an entire lecture — so easily that their brains turn the process into a kind of automated rote exercise.

If that’s true, your child’s distractibility would be much more likely to occur with a laptop than with pen and pad.

The study showed that handwritten notes help students retain information both short-term and long-term. This led one of the researchers, Pam A. Mueller, to claim of laptops: “In situations where you’re trying to understand ideas, I don’t think they’re very useful.”

In a more recent experiment, Audrey van der Meer with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology used EEGs to track the brain patterns of children and young adults while they took an examination. The results showed that brain waves were much more active when kids used handwriting over keyboarding. Van der Meer speculates: “The use of pen and paper gives the brain more ‘hooks’ to hang your memories on.”

Perhaps most telling is this detail from a 2021 study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience: pen-and-pad notetakers don’t just score better than keyboarders; they exhibit a more positive mood while doing it. Study authors surmise that the positive sensations elicited by handwriting — which include higher feelings of vigor and activity — may be a cause of its role in improved learning.

That makes sense to me as it likely does to anyone who’s used both methods. Writing by hand is naturally more dynamic. Transcribing on a laptop is a passive, stultifying experience.

Interestingly enough, the smartest, highest-achieving kids I know — without any awareness of the studies I’ve mentioned — almost unanimously choose to take notes by hand when given the choice. I believe when it comes to their personal success, they instinctively know that paper gives them an edge over plastic.

And, apparently, so do your child’s teachers. So, in this case, I would trust that they’ve made the right call. Given the confidence-inducing connection between experience, common sense, and science, I’d expect no less from any educator.

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Jody Stallings has been an award-winning teacher in Charleston since 1992 and is director of the Charleston Teacher Alliance. To submit a question, order his books, or follow him on social media, please visit JodyStallings.com.