Pen And Paper Beats Laptops For Memory

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a foolproof method to ensure your kids retained more information from their classroom lessons? According to a new study, there now is.

It’s called pen and paper.

A new study conducted by Princeton University’s Psychology Department has revealed that learning outcomes are greatly enhanced by taking notes longhand as opposed to on a computer. In the study, students watched a video of a lecture then took a quiz on the topic from the lecture. The results from the quiz showed that the laptop learners being outperformed by the longhand learners across the board.

In the past, this same result has been found, but previously it was attributed to multi-tasking and distraction when using a laptop for note taking. However, in the Princeton study, researchers allowed for this and only allowed students to solely take notes and not do anything else with their laptops during the study – the results still showed that the laptop note takers performed below the longhand learners.

Studying the notes taken by the students in both categories, they found that those taking notes on laptops tended to record more of the lecture verbatim, rather than processing the information and reframing it in their own words – which is how those using pen and paper did. 

With this in mind, the researchers warned the laptop learners that verbatim note taking was detrimental to their learning and advised the laptop learners to try and take their notes in their own words. After re-running the test, it was found that this warning in fact served no effect - the laptop learners still were underperforming against the pen and paper students.

This odd phenomenon seems to come down to the difference between generative (summarizing and paraphrasing) and non-generative (verbatim copying) note taking. Kids on laptops are far more likely to engage in non-generative note taking as they can type faster than they can write longhand, meaning that they will tend to copy what is being said as opposed to summarise it. The researchers found that this form of note taking led to ‘shallower’ processing in the brain, meaning that the information wasn’t as deeply embedded.

Do your kids use laptops at school, or pen and paper?

Source : parents[dot]nickjr[dot]com[dot]au