In each study, however, those who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who used took notes with their laptops. As in other studies, students who used laptops took more notes. Half of the students were instructed to take notes with a laptop, and the other half were instructed to write the notes out by hand. New research by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer demonstrates that students who write out their notes on paper actually learn more.ДЄcross three experiments, Mueller and Oppenheimer had students take notes in a classroom setting and then tested students on their memory for factual detail, their conceptual understanding of the material, and their ability to synthesize and generalize the information. Obviously, it is advantageous to draft more complete notes that precisely capture the course content and allow for a verbatim review of the material at a later date. Moreover, when students take notes using laptops they tend to take notes verbatim, writing down every last word uttered by their professor.

Indeed, because students can type significantly faster than they can write, those who use laptops in the classroom tend to take more notes than those who write out their notes by hand. Laptops do in fact allow students to do more, like engage in online activities and demonstrations, collaborate more easily on papers and projects, access information from the internet, and take more notes. When it comes to college students, the belief that more is better may underlie their widely-held view that laptops in the classroom enhance their academic performance. вЂњMore is better.вЂќ From the number of gigs in a cellular data plan to the horsepower in a pickup truck, this mantra is ubiquitous in American culture. This has been the hottest question on note-taking for the past few years, and we have an answer for you! Today, we reveal the winner of the ultimate note-taking battleвЂ¦ the pencil and paper or the computer.

ItвЂ™s time for the note-taking showdown everyone has been waiting for. Nobody really knows why yet, it has just been observed experimentally. But thereвЂ™s something about the act of handwriting that imprints the content more firmly on the brain.

Typed notes can just be seen as dictation: in one ear and out the other. For college students, the evidence is emerging that handwritten notes promote remembering the content better than typed notes.

Note taking programs for college