Do you take notes by hand or digitally?

Many people use digital devices for note-taking. I’ve also moved to digital devices for most things, including my to-do list and calendar (which I used to manage on paper until just a few years ago).

Digital notes have many advantages; for me, the biggest one is that I can access the information from different devices or use the search function to find something specific.

But do digital devices affect how well you remember the information? Is writing on paper better?

The answer depends a lot on your goal.

Let’s dive into the research.

What the research says

In one study, participants watched TED talks of approximately 15 minutes duration. During the talks, they took notes - some typed on a laptop, while others took longhand notes.

Later, the participants had to answer different questions about the TED talks (obviously, without using their notes).

There were two types of questions:

• Factual: Remembering some fact that was explicitly stated in the talk.

• Conceptual: Questions that were related to the content of the talk, but that required some additional thought process or analysis.

For factual questions, there was no significant difference between digital and longhand note takers. But there was a significant difference in the conceptual questions, with participants who had taken handwritten notes outperforming those who had typed their notes on a laptop.

When the researchers analyzed the participants’ notes, they realized that the laptop group wrote more words but also had more verbatim content (i.e., they typed exact phrases from the talk) than the handwriting group.

Researchers tested variations of the original experiment, such as (1) asking laptop participants to take notes in their own words rather than verbatim transcription and (2) giving participants the opportunity to study their notes before answering the questions. Both variations reduced the differences a bit, but the general pattern was similar: Note-taking by hand outperformed note-taking on a laptop.

In another study, participants listened to word lists. They were asked to write down each word by hand, type on a laptop, or type on an iPad using the touchscreen keyboard.

After that, they had two tasks:

1. Free recall: Recalling as many words as possible from the list.

2. Recognition: Listening to another word list and for each word, decide if it had been in the original list or not.

In task 1, participants remembered significantly more words after writing them down by hand rather than typing. For task 2, the recognition task, no differences were observed between the note-taking methods.

What the results mean

Coming back to our initial question, “What’s better, handwritten notes or digital notes?”, if your goal is to understand and remember ideas (not just capture information), handwritten notes are better.

Still, we need to put this into perspective. Digital notes also have advantages, e.g.:

• Maintenance: There are no huge paper stacks to maintain.

• Speed: Most people type more quickly than they handwrite, so you can capture more information.

• Practicality: Digital notes are easier to organize, edit, tag, and search.

• Access: Depending on where you store your notes, you may be able to access them from different devices.

So: On the one hand, handwritten notes could facilitate learning. But on the other hand, digital notes have advantages, too.

My recommendation is:

• When dealing with content you need to remember or analyze in-depth, prioritize handwriting. You can still pass your notes into a digital format later.

• If you just need to jot something down, use whichever method is more comfortable for you.

• Yet another option is to use a tablet with a stylus, if that’s your thing.

Also, it’s not only about note-taking per se because many techniques enhance memory independent of how you take your notes. Summarizing the information, organizing it, and testing yourself improve learning, regardless of your note-taking method. I talked about this in a previous edition of this newsletter.

So, as often in science, there’s no straightforward answer to this question, but I hope this edition helps you to see the advantages of both methods and make more informed decisions!

What else I’ve been up to:

In case you haven’t seen my new article on Medium, here it is:

If you’re not a Medium member, click here to read it for free.

That’s it for today!

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Until next time!

Best wishes,

Patricia (Dr. Schmidt) from creatorschmidt.com