Moving around the lecture theatre while my students are working on some problem or exercise, it is surprising to see how many students persist with trying to use a laptop. I say surprising because most of the exercises I do with my class involve drawing diagrams, and drawing diagrams on a laptop is not easy. It would be much easier to draw the diagrams on paper, and that is what most students do.
The choice of note-taking medium is not benign. There have been a number of studies that have shown that hand-written notes are better for student learning than notes taken on devices such as laptops or tablets. In fact, I've blogged on this topic before (see here, as well as this post on laptop use more generally).
A recent meta-analysis makes the case even more strongly, that hand-written notes are better than notes taken on devices. That meta-analysis is reported in this 2024 article by Abraham Flanigan (Georgia Southern University) and co-authors, published in the journal Educational Psychology Review (open access). They combined the results of 24 studies (published across 21 articles), limiting their scope to experimental or quasi-experimental studies that involved university students (therefore excluding studies on high school students, who may approach their studies in different ways). They focus on two outcomes: (1) student achievement; and (2) the volume of notes taken.
In relation to student achievement, Flanigan et al. find:
...a mean effect size of 0.248, p < .001[95%CI ∶ 0.181, 0.315], which was statistically significant. This finding indicates that the overall sample of studies found that handwritten note-taking had a positive effect on achievement, meaning that handwriting notes produced higher achievement than typing notes.
Students using hand-written notes perform nearly a quarter of a standard deviation better than students using laptops or tablets for note-taking. That's not a huge difference, but it could make a real difference for some students. In my ECONS101 class, a quarter standard deviation difference is about four percentage points in overall grade, enough to drop a student by a grade point (from a B+ to a B, for example).
Flanigan et al. them perform some further analysis, which shows that the positive effect of hand-written notes (compared with notes taken on a device) is statistically similar for immediate and delayed assessments, and for different measures of student achievement. When students are allowed to review their notes, the effect is larger than when they are not allowed to review them.
In terms of the volume of notes taken, Flanigan et al. find that:
...the overall mean effect size was statistically significant (0.919, p < 0.001[95%CI ∶ 0.679, 1.160]). These results indicate that typed notes contain more words and ideas than handwritten notes.
Taking those two results together, when students take notes on a device, they write a greater quantity of notes, but those notes are less effective in terms of the students' learning. Flanigan et al. offer some explanation for these results, being that:
...handwriting notes produce deeper processing than typing notes. Longhand notes tend to capture lecture ideas in a paraphrased and personalized style meaningful to the note-taker, whereas typed notes tend to capture lecture ideas in a verbatim, almost thoughtless way... Although typing leads to a greater quantity of recorded ideas than writing does, the shallow, verbatim nature of typing notes seems to hinder their external storage value, thereby rendering typed notes less useful during review than handwritten notes...
...handwritten notes contain more lecture images than typed notes. In studies measuring the number of images recorded in notes, college students typing notes recorded zero lecture images, whereas longhand notetakers recorded multiple images... According to dual-coding theory... learning occurs best when information is coded both verbally and visually.
That latter explanation is likely to be particularly important in economics. If a student doesn't take good notes of the diagrams, then they are likely to struggle to learn in class, and struggle to review later, leading overall to worse achievement in their assessments. For this reason, students should really be hand-writing their notes.
However, there is an exception, and it was good to see Flanigan et al. make this point:
Handwriting or typing lecture notes might not be an option for some students, whether their disabilities are physical or cognitive in nature. Other students might require note-taking assistance, such as having another student record notes for them or instructors providing notes for them.
Despite the number of students accessing additional support for disabilities appears to have grown over time, I have noted the number of 'note takers' (employed to take notes for other students) has declined over time. That may be because devices are seen as alleviating the need for human note takers. However, Flanigan et al.'s results suggest that relying on devices rather than human note takers may be making students with a disability worse off.
Finally, there are two points that Flanigan et al. don't make in their article, which are useful to consider. First, not all laptops and tablets are created equal. Touch-screen devices that allow students to hand-write notes, and then convert those notes to text, are probably more like hand-written notes than notes taken on a device. However, that may depend on how the device is used, because they do of course allow students to type as well. Some further study on this seems warranted. Second, I wonder how note-taking by AI would fare in comparison with notes taken by a student? I suspect that the AI would err on the side of verbatim notes, similar to typed notes by a student, rather than paraphrased notes that a student who is hand-writing their notes would make. On the other hand, the AI could be explicitly instructed to paraphrase. Going back to the previous point about students with a disability, an appropriately instructed AI tool could make a substantial positive impact. That is definitely something worth exploring further.
How students take notes has an impact on their learning, and on their achievement in assessments. For now it seems, hand-written notes remain best, at least until we can let an AI take over the note-taking.
[HT: This article in The Conversation last month]
Read more:
