Want to Learn? Lose the Laptop

Here is an interesting article shared with me by Pete Kiecker:

Want to Learn? Lose the Laptop

by Fred Barbash

from the Washington Post

IF YOU REMEMBER taking class notes in longhand, there’s a good chance you also remember more about a variety of topics than today’s students do. A study investigated whether taking notes by hand helps you learn better than taking notes on a laptop. It was no contest.

Study authors and psychologists Pam A. Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the University of California– Los Angeles conducted three separate experiments involving a total of 327 students. All students got the same lectures, but some used laptops, and others took notes by hand.

When it came to learning the concepts, the handwriters won. When it came to retrieving facts, the groups were comparable, except when given time to go home and look at their notes, at which point the handwriters did better.

“Even when allowed to review notes after a week’s delay, participants who had taken notes with laptops performed worse on tests of both factual content and conceptual understanding,” the study states.

Learning suffered not because of “multitasking” or the distraction available to students using Wi-Fi– enabled laptops. In the lab, scientists allowed no extraneous activity. Students who paid attention and took deep notes on their laptop still didn’t learn as well—in fact, the study suggests the thoroughness of their notes contributes to the problem.

Laptop users tend to record long, verbatim quotes, which they type mindlessly. Handwriters are more selective. They “wrote significantly fewer words than those who typed,” according to the study. By processing and selecting the more important information, they studied more efficiently, said researchers.

Here’s what’s a bit frightening: When the laptop students were instructed to cut down or eliminate the verbatim note taking, they couldn’t. The study adds to a ton of evidence that for learning, writing is better and that the hand has a “unique relationship with the brain when it comes to composing thoughts and ideas.”

Of course, the chance of persuading students to put away their laptops is probably zero. Many of them can’t write longhand, a forgotten subject in many American schools, itself a source of controversy.

So are we stuck with traditional classrooms and learning techniques if we want the brightest pupils? Perhaps not: Another possibility, some have suggested, is apps that permit handwriting on tablets, a compromise that students might accept.