As the end of the year draws nearer and nearer, classes begin to give more tests and major assessments. Exams, quizzes and labs all pile up on the unsuspecting student, who desperately turns to one of the most valuable resources he owns: his school notes.
Recently, several classes on campus have come close to adjusting their in-class note-taking policies—history instructor Dr. Bruce Westrate’s classes, for example, are generally structured around a shared Microsoft Teams meeting that is projected to everyone’s personal device. Westrate’s classes nearly made the switch from purely online notes to handwritten ones.
For sophomore Cade Daigle, this change would have drastically altered his note-taking strategies.
“I take notes with my laptop; I’ll usually have three tabs open, one with the Teams meeting, one with my personal notes and one with the group notes,” Daigle said. “I’ll take notes on my personal doc and refer to the group doc to make sure I’m not missing anything.”
History Department Chair David Fisher, however, points out several issues with the digital system in place.
“The problem is that generally not everyone is taking notes,” Fisher said. “If you look around the class, you’ll see a lot of kids doing other things.”
Daigle seconds Fisher’s sentiment. Although there are some obvious downsides to switching to pen and paper, handwritten notes are more beneficial in the long run.
“I’m a lot slower with writing, and it’s going be harder to keep up,” Daigle said. “But also, on the flip side, (the switch) will help me focus more.”
In fact, many tangible benefits come from taking notes by hand instead of taking notes digitally. Some of these benefits even encourage students to voluntarily make the switch.
“This is an issue that educationists have been looking at for a while,” Fisher said. “There is quite a lot of research that shows that paper and pencil note taking is more efficient and effective than online note taking.”
A study done by Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer lists several of the problems with digital note taking: more shallow information processing, the opportunity to get distracted and multitask and so on. From a learning perspective, handwritten notes are mostly superior.
“The problem with the screen is that there are too many distractions and too many things that are going on,” Fisher said. “I even think about this in terms of assigning reading to kids at home. There’s always distractions, so you’re going to have a different relationship with the information you do with paper.”
However, there are also advantages to taking notes on a device, hence the large preference for laptops and iPads in class; not only are online notes easy to organize, but they are also much easier to create.
“There clearly is an efficiency benefit to taking notes digitally,” Fisher said. “We use our computers for so many things, so it’s useful to have those notes there.”
