In a sense, they take notes all day long so they are an interesting subject. On the other hand they are taking notes related to an external source, and not of stuff they are thinking by themselves or content anchored in a process other than passing a test.
I took notes by hand at school and take only digital notes now that I am working. While I respect the research done, I can’t help but feel that there’s something missing.
Intuitively, I can’t imagine that content that comes from my own brain that I am formatting into notes has a completely different retention rate depending on wether I type it or write it. Especially as I have no time pressure to think about what I’ll write.
Basically, would I remember this comment better if I wrote it on a post’it ? Id really like a study on this, and not students at school.
Like you said, I think a better takeaway from this study is that you don’t remember what you don’t think about or engage with. I’m perfectly capable of not thinking about what I write and subsequently forgetting it just as much as this study claims only happens whe you type stuff out.
It's not just a function of the average conceptual speed of the lecture, either, it's also a function of how bursty it is, and both are relative to what you already know and modulated by the quality of the presentation.
Taped lectures are a game changer because you can 2x over the slow parts and dwell on the bursts.
And that's been my experience as a math student. Professors of advanced math courses tend to write very quickly for brief bursts and then pause to explain what's going on. The definition or proof they describe can often be subtle enough that you don't have much of a chance to understand it unless you've had the opportunity to preview the lecture notes before class.
Tragically, not every professor provides lecture notes in advance, and some don't provide lecture notes at all. Then if you're taking notes by hand you're taking a big risk that you might pause to reflect and miss noting a crucial step in the proof, leaving yourself baffled by what you wrote later on.
If you look at the paper sheet, it is because you have to check you are still on the guideline.
However I believe that at uni, I would write a whole line without looking if I needed to (that's after about a decade of fast hand writing almost 8 hours a day, 4-5 days a week, though). That those lines had a tendency to go up or down was not a problem, because making a clean copy of those notes was part of my learning strategy.
Of course it's only anecdotal evidence, but when I was studying at university I could register pretty much everything by hand (thanks to using a fountain pen. Those who wish to write fast for any reason should consider a fountain pen - with a medium or broad, relatively stiff nib) and still I find manual note taking much more effective than typing.
You still are doing lots of mental computations when you write by hand, even if you don't need to summarize.
When writing in cursive, the entire word affects how you write each letter, while in block letter writing each letter is independent. Keyboard typing is like block letter writing in that respect, and I suspect that might also be playing a role.
From the linked paper:
> Taking notes on laptops rather than in longhand is increasingly common. Many researchers have suggested that laptop note taking is less effective than longhand note taking for learning. Prior studies have primarily focused on students’ capacity for multitasking and distraction when using laptops. The present research suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing. In three studies, we found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand. We show that whereas taking more notes can be beneficial, laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.
The mechanism here is probably that people are able to type faster, so typing lets them write down every word, whereas handwriting forces them to choose what to write down. The superior way of note taking by this logic is clearly typing on your phone.
But this has irrelevant for note taking as people on HN are likely to understand it: Writing down your ideas.