Walk into almost any university lecture hall today and you will see the same picture: rows of students hidden behind laptop screens, their fingers flying across the keyboards. Many high school classrooms look the same. Typing is fast, neat and easy to search later. It seems obvious that it is the best way to take notes. I am not so sure.
In 2014, two American psychologists, Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer, published a study that caught the attention of teachers around the world. They asked students to watch short lectures and take notes, some on laptops and some by hand. Afterwards, the students answered questions about what they had seen. Both groups did about equally well on simple factual questions. However, on questions that required understanding ideas, the students who had written by hand did better.
The researchers had an explanation. Because most people type much faster than they write, laptop users tended to copy the lecturer's words almost exactly, without thinking about them. Students writing by hand could not keep up, so they were forced to listen, decide what was important and put it in their own words. In other words, the slowness of the pen made their brains work harder.
To be fair, later studies have not always found the same strong effect, and scientists continue to debate the results. Typing also has real advantages. For students with certain learning difficulties, a keyboard can make the difference between taking notes and taking none at all. And notes on a computer are easier to organize and share.
Yet there is another problem with laptops that has nothing to do with typing: distraction. A laptop is not only a notebook. It is also a window to messages, videos and games. Even students with good intentions find it hard to resist checking just one notification, and research suggests that a classmate's screen can distract the students sitting nearby as well.
I am not suggesting that we throw our laptops away. But I believe that schools should encourage students to take notes by hand, at least in some lessons, and let them discover the difference for themselves. Sometimes the slower path leads to deeper understanding.