Taking Class Notes by Hand or by Typing? There’s more to it than that!

I was a good note taker in school. Well, let me clarify. In high school, I was very fast at copying all the information that my teachers put on the chalkboard or overhead projector. I’m a competitive guy so it was a competition to see if I could be one of the first people in the class to put down my pen and sit back in my chair. I was almost always one of the first to do so. In university, that translated into fast transcription of lectures. It was only the fastest talking course instructors that caused me to have the occasional blank space or question mark left on my page.

That would have been the 90’s. Laptops were just starting to appear and so there was certainly no one sitting in class with one taking notes. I wonder how much faster I could have been with a laptop? More importantly, I wonder if it would have made a difference in my final course grades?

A few years ago, a research study came out comparing note taking by hand to note taking done using a computer. The conclusion was that note taking by hand was superior to typing them on a computer when it came to overall course performance and success.

The researchers said that taking notes on a computer allows you to record them far more quickly, making it easy to simply type verbatim what is being said. Recording by hand, however, forces students to come up with an overall summary of what’s being said since they can’t transcribe word for word. It’s that synopsis, suggested the researchers, that allowed students producing handwritten notes to enjoy greater course understanding.

It is interesting to note that the aforementioned study is about the most often quoted study on note taking methods. You can find it cited by the UK’s The Guardian, NPR, Scientific American, PBS, even the Wall Street Journal. From a quick search around, there don’t seem to be other studies either supporting or refuting what’s been said. That’s a point not lost on Andrew Watson. A teacher keen on the application of neuroscience and psychology in his classroom, Andrew is a regular contributor on those topics on Learning & the Brain.

He says that we should be careful of what we believe. For it may not be the computer that is bad and the pen that is good but the student’s note taking skills that makes the true difference. A student who records notes verbatim by hand will simply type faster verbatim notes. Compare that to a student who does her best to synthesize what’s being said and put that down in her own words.

So at this point perhaps we can agree that it’s not what you use to take notes but how you go about taking them that makes the difference. Students need to work smarter, not harder. Furthermore, it seems fair to add that it’s about how a student interacts with those notes after first taking them. Does the student go back to them that night or not until the night before the test? Does the student go back and review them periodically throughout the course or only just before the final exam?

Michael C. Friedman, a Research Fellow in the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching at Harvard University, has put together a review of research on the process of note taking. He makes some excellent recommendations for both students and instructors.

For students:

· Recap don’t repeat what’s been presented

· Review the notes on the day they were taken and then regularly after that

· Test don’t simply read (e.g., make flashcards or create your own quiz questions or use something like the Cornell Notes)

· Consider carefully the benefit of faster notes by typing on a laptop but at the risk of being distracted by the internet

For instructors:

· Have a note taking policy/theory and explain it to students

· Pre-load students with an overview of the information so that they will have a better idea during class of what is most important and take selective notes accordingly

· Remind students to synthesize in their own words what’s been said

· Connect one topic to the next and challenge students to also go looking for those connections too

Whether handwritten or typed, attention to the details of note taking by both student and instructor could lead to a better overall understanding of course materials. I’m glad laptops weren’t around when I was in university. I definitely would have been too distracted to type fast notes let alone succinct ones.