With technology taking over every aspect of our lives bit by bit, day by day, it is common to find students depending upon their tech devices more and more. In classrooms, students are swapping their paper notebooks and pens in favour of laptops and tablets, believing digital note-taking to be more efficient than note-taking apps by hand. But is that really so?
For exam preparation, you must put in the right amount of practice at the right time and use the right resources. These "resources" come from the notes students take in class and then use as revision notes before exams. It is at this point that you realise the benefits of taking handwritten notes versus writing notes online.
An American study called "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking" by Pam A. Mueller from Princeton University and Daniel M. Oppenheimer from the University of California, Los Angeles, was published in 2014. It found that students who used a computer (or another tech device like a laptop, tablet, or smartphone) recorded verbatim notes and noted down as much of the lecture as possible. Students who take notes by hand cannot jot down notes as fast as those who use a notes app and tend to be more selective in what portions of the teacher's lecture they write down. Handwritten notes force the students to do some extra processing of the study material when they think about what they are writing down rather than copying word-for-word.
How was the study done? Students were shown pre-recorded lectures and asked to take notes while watching these lectures. A short while later, both groups of students (the ones who took notes digitally and those who took notes by hand) were tested to see how much they remembered factual information. It was found that they were equally good. However, when it came to answering more complicated questions that required the application of certain concepts and remembering connections, those students who took notes by hand performed better. All the students were then allowed a week to study their revision notes and tested again. This time, the students who wrote notes online were outdone by the students who wrote notes by hand both in the factual and the complicated questions.
It is also believed that the human brain connects automatically when it sees the handwriting it has produced, and hence, students learn better and remember what they are learning better if they make use of handwritten notes. It is true that the clean typed version of revision notes produced with notes apps sends a message to our brains and helps us learn, but the message sent to the brain when it sees its own handwriting with all its quirks is much stronger and more personal. A more recent study of university students and fresh graduates in Japan found that writing on tangible paper leads to greater brain activity when recalling information a short while later. Writing by hand on paper you can touch and feel sends unique information to the brain and leads to better memory.
It is thought that digital tools like note apps are more efficient than taking notes by hand, but the Japanese study found that volunteers who used ink and paper were about 25% quicker in taking notes than those who used note apps. Also important is the fact that for exam preparation, volunteers who used pen and paper were in a better position than those who used a stylus and tablet/smartphone. Volunteers using paper showed greater brain activity in areas associated with language, imagination, memory and navigation.
Exam preparation with handwritten notes means that you can earmark pages, write in the margins, underline essential portions, highlight them, draw circles, and arrows and add sticky notes as you study. Digital documents may have all these features, but nothing can mimic the information sent to the brain by touching paper and reading familiar handwriting. There is no doubt, therefore, that for academic success, the benefits of taking handwritten notes are much greater than using digital notes.
Reference Link: Taking Handwritten Notes
