In 2013, researchers designed an experiment to determine if taking notes by hand made things “stick” more than taking notes on a computer. Mueller and Oppenheimer had participants watch an engaging TED talk that covered an interesting – though esoteric – topic. Some participants took notes with a computer and some took notes with a computer. Participants were then given some non-related cognitive tasks to purge their working memory. Finally, participants were tested on the content of the TED video (both factual recall and conceptual relationships).
When it came to factual recall, there was not a significant difference in the performance of both groups. But when questions tested higher-order thinking like comparison and application, participants who took notes by hand outperformed the computer users.
The researchers also analyzed the notes that had been taken by the participants to analyze the volume and character of notetaking (for example, verbatim versus consolidated) to help understand the results. The study is fascinating and is constructed with much more rigor and checks and balances – you should totally read it.
By every measure, this study is watertight – the researchers did a solid job with their experiment. Which is why it has no doubt been a driving factor when schools develop their technology plans. This study has been cited in over 1,800 papers (to put things in perspective, only 0.025% of papers are cited over 1000 times).
But.
A lot has changed in the last decade.
And when you dive deep into the study fractures that were not present in 2013 begin to emerge. For instance, all participants (across three different studies there were 327) were in college. The study does not indicate participant background in digital notetaking. And while we cannot examine the history of the participants, we can contextualize the landscape of K12 institutions thanks to the National Center for Education Statistics report from 2008. The ratio of students to instructional computers with Internet access was 3.1 to 1. The iPhone came out in June that year. The iPad wouldn’t come out for another two years. The technology policies for many schools most likely prohibited the use of personal devices.
So it is immediately clear that the student participants probably did not have rich experience using technology to take notes. And even if they did, there was another speed bump: participants were not permitted to use their own devices; they had to use specific ones provided by the researchers. The foreign device provided by the experimenters may have impeded efficacy because of a higher cognitive load. Think about it – Mac keyboards have different keys than PCs. Some PCs have numeric keypads, some don’t. Some keyboards have different locations for certain keys. Keyboards have keys of different sizes. The wonderful gestures that Mac users can use on their trackpad did not exist on most PCs in 2013. Many users found the “nub” on the IBM ThinkPad to be much more effective than trackpads.
All this to say that participants may not have had the background or tools to be successful.
A lot has changed in the last decade.
Students have a richer background in personal technology. There have been massive advances in software designed for notetaking. School districts are investing more in technology for their students.
Aside from technology there have also been radical changes in the way students learn. In the original study, Mueller and Oppenheimer strategically chose the TED videos as an approximation of classroom lecturing. But we know that when active learning goes toe-to-toe with lecturing, active learning comes out ahead (even if students don’t feel that way). And those five TED videos don’t reflect a diverse population (and we know that diversity matters in student learning).
Additionally, TED talks famously rely on entertaining storytelling – and in some cases riddled with seductive details – all of which are not necessarily reflected in generic classrooms.
One might wonder why this experiment hasn’t been replicated before. As it turns out, it has! In fact, there have been a number of studies attempting to replicate the findings. And none of them have been able to do so. Researchers in one of the most notable studies, How Much Mightier Is the Pen than the Keyboard for Note-Taking? A Replication and Extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer, performed a direct replication (even using the same TED videos) with mixed results. Lead researcher Kayla Morehead concluded that there were nonsignificant advantages for notetaking by hand.
So what does this mean?
Well, it means we need to do more research. We need to learn how students learn in tandem with technology. Morehead arrives at the same conclusion – “Further exploring plausible factors that could moderate the relative benefits of laptop versus longhand note-taking comprises an important avenue for future research.“
The Mueller and Oppenheimer study is incredible – but it’s a snapshot of what we knew to be true a decade ago. Much has changed since that study was published. Science changes as we learn. And until we learn more about the perfusion of technology into our cognitive abilities, it is time to stop making draconian policies based on outdated research.
