Using pen and paper for note taking is great for digesting content, but keeping paper materials organized is another story. By her students’ accounts, a computer-less lecture setting increased absorption during lectures. Her theory, based on her own pre-digital college experience, was that students would learn better with a pen and paper-mostly because it vanquished the urge to “multi-task” (IM friends) during lecture time. One University of Kansas professor, annoyed with students burying their faces in laptops in her lectures, banned them for a semester.

In older students, a University of Washington study demonstrates how printing, cursive writing, and keyboarding each produce unique brain patterns when students compose text by hand, they express more words and ideas and have an increased overall brain activation.įor anyone that remembers taking notes by hand, these findings probably are not surprising. An Indiana University study of pre-literate kindergarteners’ MRI data shows how handwriting exercises stimulated the learning centers in students’ brains at a higher level compared to typing or tracing activities. Science connects handwriting and cognitive pathways in the brainĪcademics have sufficiently probed the connection between handwriting, learning and recall in children of all ages. There is a deliberate brain process at play. You digest what you see and hear, and make a note to yourself about what you are thinking at that moment in order to remember it. Think about when you make a handwritten note. Secondly, note taking on a laptop in a lecture setting tends toward verbatim transcription, and thereby reduces the cognitive processing that happens when notes are jotted out by hand. The first is that laptops come with lots of distractions and therefore add another attentiveness burden for the user-thank you, Internet. Why does this happen? Researchers posit two reasons. In fact, a Princeton study found that when laptops are used solely to take notes, it may actually impair deep conceptual learning.

Apparently it’s not such a good idea-science tells us that typing notes is less effective than the old-school pen and paper method. Have you ever seen a classroom full of students typing furiously into a laptop computer during a lecture? Perhaps you do this yourself during meetings or seminars.

Best tablet for handwriting notes 2016