If you’ve been reading our “Weekly Update for Students” emails, you’ve noticed the monthly CARE tips. This is good general advice for students to excel in their studies. One of our recent CARE tips suggested buying a binder for each course and supplied a link to an NPR article on making hand-written notes. Interestingly enough, the article cited a few studies that indicated hand-written notes are more effective for memory retention than typed notes.
We all know typing your notes is faster than writing them by hand, so there’s the advantage of getting down more material if you type them. But apparently, the pros of writing notes by hand are even stronger.
In the first study, a group of students listened to TED Talks – some typing their notes and others taking theirs by hand. When they were tested on the material covered, those who wrote their notes by hand performed better on questions concerning the application of concepts in the talks while performing equally on questions over pure data.
The second study saw the same results, even though those typing notes were told to reduce the amount of words they type so their thought process would resemble those who take notes by hand. In the third study, the students were permitted to review their notes before being tested. You guessed it. Those who’d written down their notes performed better, even though they had fewer notes to study.
Why is that? The article proposes that these are two types of note-taking: generative and nongenerative. In generative, the mind being stimulated to comprehend the concepts presented, and in nongenerative, the mind merely copying words like a stenographer. Since it is thought that your brain is more active when taking notes by hand, it helps you to recall more from a lecture than simply tasking it with copying down words. The engine of one’s wit is thus far more occupied, leading to more gratifying results.
I admit it’s true that it’s impossible to take notes by hand in some classes. (A nursing student once told me everyone in her classes was typing their notes because there was too much covered to write it out.) Generally, though, I think that if we all decided to take hand-written notes, our grades would go up; we’d understand our material better, and we’d be more satisfied with our college experience.
