Why you shouldn’t take notes with your laptop

It has become trendy or the in-thing in seminars, office meetings, schools and even churches to take notes with laptops or electronic touch screen notebooks, it becomes harder to be the odd one out using the good old, reliable pen and paper to take your notes.
Well, reliable research has shown that you are not really doing yourself a favour when you take certain notes electronically.
Maggy McGloin explained it in her write up in BRW: “according to a study conducted by Princeton’s Pam A. Mueller and UCLA’s Daniel M. Oppenheimer. Their research shows that when you only use a laptop to take notes, you don’t absorb new materials as well, largely because typing notes encourages verbatim, mindless transcription.
“Mueller and Oppenheimer conducted three different studies, each addressing the question: Is laptop note taking detrimental to overall conceptual understanding and retention of new information?
“For the first study, the researchers presented a series of TED talk films to a room of Princeton University students. The participants “were instructed to use their usual classroom note-taking strategy,” whether digitally or longhand, during the lecture. Later on, the participants “responded to both factual-recall questions and conceptual-application questions” about the film.

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“The students’ scores differed immensely between longhand and laptop note takers. While participants using laptops were found to take lengthier “transcriptionlike” notes during the film, results showed that longhand note takers still scored significantly higher on conceptually-based questions. Mueller and Oppenheimer predicted that the decrease in retention appeared to be due to “verbatim transcription.”
“But they predicted that the detriments of laptop note taking went beyond the fact that those with computers were trying to get every word down. In their second study, Mueller and Oppenheimer instructed a new group of laptop note takers to write without transcribing the lecture verbatim. They told the subjects:
“Take notes in your own words and don’t just write down word-for-word what the speaker is saying.”
“These participants also watched a lecture film, took their respective notes and then took a test.
“They found that their request for nonverbatim note taking was “completely ineffective,” and the laptop users continued to take notes in a “transcription like” manner rather than in their own words.
“In a third study, Mueller and Oppenheimer confronted a final variable – they found that laptop note takers produced a significantly greater word count than longhand note takers.
“For this study, participants “were given either a laptop or pen and paper to take notes on a lecture,” and “were told that they would be returning the following week to be tested on the material.” A week later, they were given 10 minutes to study their notes before being tested.
And again, though the laptop note takers recorded a larger amount of notes, the longhand note takers performed better on conceptual, and this time factual, questions.

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“This final test clarified that the simple act of verbatim note taking encouraged by laptops could ultimately result in impaired learning.
“Though your days of cramming for tests may be over, you still need to recall pitches, dates and statistics from meetings. That’s why we take notes in meetings. And while there are plenty of ways to work smarter with digital tools, you may remember more if you leave the laptop or tablet at your desk and try bringing a notebook and pen instead.”
So, dust up you old fashion notebooks and pen, or simply buy new ones, when you have to take important notes you wish to commit to memory.

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