Effective Note Taking 3 Lessons Learned

Amy Jung
Coach Zane
Digital Citizen B5
5 May 2014

What is a more effective way of taking notes - laptop or notepad?

       In schools, there are students who use laptop computers to take their notes and those who take them by writing. However, there wasn't a research that compared these two methods, until a  new study published in Psychological Science has attempted to answer this question.
       The three things that I found that was interesting in this research was: First, the achievement of the students differed from the type of question they solved. The students that took notes longhand and with laptops showed the same results with factual recall questions, but in conceptual question, the longhand students were far more superior. Second, the students that wrote their notes longhand wrote fewer words and less verbatim transcriptions, but they scored better. Lastly, the researchers informed the students not to type verbatim notes, with the hope that this would negate the negative effect of using the laptops; but this verbal reminder proved to have no effect whatsoever on the students' performance. Also, the researchers gave the laptop students ten minutes to revise, but the results didn't change.(Neurobonkers)

Works Cited

Neurobonkers. "What Is a More Effective Way of Taking Notes - Laptop or Notepad? | Neurobonkers |                 Big Think." Big Think. Floating University, 26 Apr. 2014. Web. 05 May 2014.