The students then completed three distractor tasks, including a taxing working memory task. The students, who watched the talks in small groups, were either given laptops (disconnected from Internet) or notebooks, and were told to use whatever strategy they normally used to take notes. In the first study, 65 college students watched one of five TED Talks covering topics that were interesting but not common knowledge. Mueller and Oppenheimer, who is now at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, conducted a series of studies to investigate whether their intuitions about laptop and longhand note-taking were true. “Danny said that he’d had a related experience in a faculty meeting: He was taking notes on his computer, and looked up and realized that he had no idea what the person was actually talking about.” “I felt like I’d gotten so much more out of the lecture that day,” says Mueller, who was working with psychology researcher Daniel Oppenheimer at the time. Mueller was prompted to investigate the question after her own experience of switching from laptop to pen and paper as a graduate teaching assistant: “Our new findings suggest that even when laptops are used as intended - and not for buying things on Amazon during class - they may still be harming academic performance,” says psychological scientist Pam Mueller of Princeton University, lead author of the study. But few studies have examined how effective laptops are for the students who diligently take notes. Laptops in class have been controversial, due mostly to the many opportunities for distraction that they provide (online shopping, browsing Reddit, or playing solitaire, just to name a few).

Walk into any university lecture hall and you’re likely to see row upon row of students sitting behind glowing laptop screens. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Dust off those Bic ballpoints and college-ruled notebooks - research shows that taking notes by hand is better than taking notes on a laptop for remembering conceptual information over the long term.

Handwriting notes vs typing notes