I’ve often felt embarrassed walking into a meeting without a laptop or tablet and taking notes in longhand. Perhaps I should explain that I’m in love with my ergonomic keyboard and tend to be a bit slow and sloppy on a laptop. And, given that I spend so much of my day keyboarding, it’s a nice change to write notes, rather than typing them. Or so I tell myself.
Actually, it turns out that I may not be entirely off base taking notes in longhand. In her article, “What You Miss When You Take Notes on Your Laptop,” Maggy McGloin of the Harvard Business Review reports the results of research designed to answer the question: “Is laptop note taking detrimental to overall conceptual understanding and retention of new information?”
I think we’ve all been to meetings where the attendees appear to be listening intently to the proceedings, all while typing at an absolutely blistering pace. Princeton University’s Pam A. Mueller and UCLA’s Daniel M. Oppenheimer have discovered that when you’re typing, you don’t absorb new information as well as you do when you’re writing in longhand, because “typing notes encourages verbatim, mindless transcription.”
Ms. Mueller and Mr. Oppenheimer ran three research studies to test their hypothesis. In the first, they asked students to listen to recorded TED talks and take notes as they normally would. Then, these students were asked factual-recall and conceptual-application questions. The results were surprising. Those who took longhand notes scored higher on conceptually based questions, even though their laptop-wielding peers took much more comprehensive “transcription-like” notes.
Mueller and Oppenheimer then asked laptop users to take notes in their own words, without transcribing them. The students essentially ignored this instruction and took verbatim notes, with the same results as in the first study.
Finally, students were given a laptop or pen and paper and told that they would be able to study their notes for a test that would be given the following week. Though the laptop users produced a significantly greater volume of notes than the longhanders, they performed less well on both conceptual and factual recall tests.
So what does this all mean?
It’s still important to take notes in meetings. But there’s no reason to feel behind the times if you bring a notepad and pen with you. And focus on taking notes in your own words, because that helps you “process and summarize what is being said, rather than just regurgitating it. As the author says, “your memory may thank you.”
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