Technology is so wonderful. Thankfully, I have my laptop to my type notes on. My professor lectures at the speed of light, so without my Mac I could only dream of being able to keep up with his speed when I’m taking my notes, much less retain the information… If you’re of this mentality, then science has some news for you:
In a recent study, psychologists sat two groups of students down in front of a TED Talk to take notes: one group taking notes on their laptops while the other group did it the good ole’ fashion way—with a college ruled notebook and pencil. The two groups were then tested on how much information they were able to retain from the video. As far as remembering dates and such, the results were pretty equal among the two groups; however, when it came to conceptual thinking, the students who had handwritten their notes surpassed those with the lean, clean technology machines. This is due to the simple fact that when you handwrite your notes, it is undoubtedly slower so we are forced to summarize the information into our own terms. This is a second step of processing that we aren’t afforded when typing notes simply because, with a laptop, we have the time to type the professor’s wording out almost verbatim.
Though you may not get every word down in your notes, the extra step of processing sure goes a long way. Perhaps we should consider cutting out “note taking” in our laptop’s job description in order to get the most out of the lectures. Read the full article by clicking here.