Handwriting vs Typing Notes

It's not uncommon in a college-level course to look around the lecture hall and see a sea of laptops, tablets, and other electronic handheld devices, with keyboards clicking away while students take copious notes. Even in high school, it has become more and more commonplace to have students take notes electronically instead of by hand. But is there an advantage to either method of note-taking? Check out this excerpt from an April 17, 2016 entry in the Education section of NPR.org:

In the study published in Psychological Science, Pam A. Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the University of California, Los Angeles sought to test how note-taking by hand or by computer affects learning. "When people type their notes, they have this tendency to try to take verbatim notes and write down as much of the lecture as they can," Mueller tells NPR's Rachel Martin. "The students who were taking longhand notes in our studies were forced to be more selective — because you can't write as fast as you can type. And that extra processing of the material that they were doing benefited them."

The general argument is that students can type faster than they can write, and so typing notes helps them to capture more information. The counter-argument however is that typing notes may allow you to capture more information, but your brain is not processing the information, so writing notes is more beneficial to long-term knowledge retention (even if the notes are less extensive). Although the use of electronic devices in the classroom, for note-taking and other relevant uses, will likely continue to trend upward, it is still important to teach kids how to take notes the "old school" way, with a paper and pencil/pen. If your student needs help with note-taking, check out Club Z!'s Learning Built to Last® study skills program. Good note-taking skills, along with reading fluency, reading comprehension, higher order processing, and recall, are tremendous tools for long-term academic success.