When I started law school, one bit of advice I was given was to take my notes by hand, with a pen and paper, and not on my laptop. It was explained to me that this method would help me learn the material much better than the alternative. As it turns out, this advice given to me by a law school professor was entirely correct.
The main reason why handwritten notes are effective may be obvious to some. Students tend to get distracted when they have their laptop in front of them. They check their email, Facebook, baseball scores, TMZ - anything that might distract them from say, a discussion of the rule again perpetuities. Taking notes by hand eliminates those distractions, assuming you aren't checking your cellphone instead. These distractions have been proven to hinder learning over and over again.
However, a new study finds that the advantages to taking notes by hand do not end there. In fact, taking notes on paper helps students learn more factual information and especially helps them learn conceptual information.
Student's tend to take notes verbatim when they are doing so on a laptop. Because they can record more information on a laptop than on paper, they tend to write exactly what their professor is saying without thinking about it. Hand writers, on the other hand, have to think about what is being said, and record it in their own words because they simply cannot keep up otherwise. This processing of information in the student's brain helps students understand and retain what they hear.
Laptop adherents might be saying, if I can type faster than I can write, I can create a better record and have something solid to study later on. Logical, but it doesn't work that way. The study compared pen-and-paper note takers and laptop note takers after they had been given a chance to study their notes before an exam. Longhand note takers still significantly outscored those who had taken notes on a laptop, even after this opportunity to study.
So no matter how you look at it, note taking by hand is far better than taking notes on a laptop. And if you are reading this in class right now, you are doing it wrong.
