As laptops become smaller and more ubiquitous, and with the
advent of tablets, the idea of taking notes by hand just seems old-fashioned to
many students today. Typing your notes is faster — which comes in handy when
there's a lot of information to take down. But it turns out there are still
advantages to doing things the old-fashioned way.
For one thing, research shows that laptops and tablets have a
tendency to be distracting — it's so easy to click over to Facebook in that
dull lecture. And a study has shown that the fact that you have to be slower when you take notes by
hand is what makes it more useful in the long run.
In the study published in Psychological
Science, Pam A. Mueller
of Princeton University and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the University of
California, Los Angeles sought to test how note-taking by hand or by computer
affects learning.
"When people type
their notes, they have this tendency to try to take verbatim notes and write
down as much of the lecture as they can," Mueller tells NPR's Rachel
Martin. "The students who were taking longhand notes in our studies were
forced to be more selective — because you can't write as fast as you can type.
And that extra processing of the material that they were doing benefited
them."
Mueller and
Oppenheimer cited that note-taking can be categorized two ways: generative and
nongenerative. Generative note-taking pertains to "summarizing,
paraphrasing, concept mapping," while nongenerative note-taking involves
copying something verbatim.
And there are two
hypotheses to why note-taking is beneficial in the first place. The first idea
is called the encoding hypothesis, which says that when a person is taking
notes, "the processing that occurs" will improve "learning and
retention." The second, called the external-storage hypothesis, is that
you learn by being able to look back at your notes, or even the notes of other
people.
Because people can type
faster than they write, using a laptop will make people more likely to try to
transcribe everything they're hearing. So on the one hand, Mueller and
Oppenheimer were faced with the question of whether the benefits of being able
to look at your more complete, transcribed notes on a laptop outweigh the
drawbacks of not processing that information. On the other hand, when writing
longhand, you process the information better but have less to look back at.
For their first study, they took university students (the
standard guinea pig of psychology) and showed them TED talks about various
topics. Afterward, they found that the students who used laptops typed
significantly more words than those who took notes by hand. When testing how
well the students remembered information, the researchers found a key point of
divergence in the type of question. For questions that asked students to simply
remember facts, like dates, both groups did equally well. But for
"conceptual-application" questions, such as, "How do Japan and
Sweden differ in their approaches to equality within their societies?" the
laptop users did "significantly worse."
The same thing happened
in the second study, even when they specifically told students using laptops to
try to avoid writing things down verbatim. "Even when we told people they
shouldn't be taking these verbatim notes, they were not able to overcome that
instinct," Mueller says. The more words the students copied verbatim, the
worse they performed on recall tests.
And to test the
external-storage hypothesis, for the third study they gave students the
opportunity to review their notes in between the lecture and test. The thinking
is, if students have time to study their notes from their laptops, the fact
that they typed more extensive notes than their longhand-writing peers could possibly
help them perform better.
But the students taking
notes by hand still performed better. "This is suggestive evidence that
longhand notes may have superior external storage as well as superior encoding
functions," Mueller and Oppenheimer write.
Do studies like these
mean wise college students will start migrating back to notebooks?
"I think it is a
hard sell to get people to go back to pen and paper," Mueller says.
"But they are developing lots of technologies now like Livescribe and
various stylus and tablet technologies that are getting better and better. And
I think that will be sort of an easier sell to college students and people of
that generation."
source[npr]
0 Response to "Attention, Students: Put Your Laptops Away"
Posting Komentar