pumpnsa.blogg.se

This doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to improve if you actively work on how you take notes, especially if you dedicate yourself to it in the long-term, but it does mean that you should be wary, and honestly ask yourself whether taking notes on a computer is hindering your learning.įactors to consider when deciding how to take notes Conceptual versus factual learning However, testing shows that in most cases, telling students to avoid taking verbatim notes when typing doesn’t actually lead to an improvement in their note-taking ability. In comparison, writing down the material by hand usually involves a more in-depth processing of the material, since people tend to give more consideration to which parts of the material they should write down, as opposed to just transcribing everything the speaker says word-for-word.īeing aware of this issue might allow you to take better notes while typing, as long as you can successfully summarize and rephrase the material while typing, instead of just transcribing it verbatim. This means that when using a laptop, people tend to just type whatever the speaker or lecturer says, in a way that involves a relatively shallow cognitive processing of the material. In the case of taking notes during lectures, the main issue with typing is that people are more predisposed to engage in verbatim note-taking when they type, in comparison with when they write their notes by hand.

A similar study on the topic showed that taking notes using the pen-and-paper method leads to better recall ability than typing them up.An experiment on word recall and recognition showed that people remember lists of vocabulary words better when they write them by hand compared to when they type them on a computer.This has been demonstrated in a number of studies on the topic, ranging from those which examined memory in general, to those which examined note-taking methods in a classroom setting. In general, research shows that taking notes by hand allows you to remember the material better than typing those notes on a computer.

Factors to consider when deciding how to take notes.