This citation has been circulated widely in the past week:
Urry, H. L., Crittle, C. S., Floerke, V. A., Leonard, M. Z., Perry III, C. S., Akdilek, N., … & Zarrow, J. E. (2019). Don’t Ditch the Laptop Just Yet: A Direct Replication of Mueller and Oppenheimer’s (2014) Study 1 Plus Mini Meta-Analyses Across Similar Studies. Psychological Science, 0956797620965541.
You get the idea from the title. The replication of a previous study showing that taking notes with pencil and notebook is not superior to taking notes using your laptop. This study challenged the results of an earlier study that was often cited by using a notebook and pencil while taking notes.
OK – it is now OK for tech folks to argue students can use their laptops during class to take notes.
I am not impressed by either study for this reason. Neither study offers a good model for note-taking as the first step in studying which is really what students are doing when taking notes.
Here is a key couple of sentences from the Abstract that explain the method used in this research:
participants watched a lecture while taking notes with a laptop (n = 74) or longhand (n = 68). After a brief distraction and without the opportunity to study, they took a quiz
This is really a method that would be appropriate to the generative function of taking notes. Do you understand better while taking notes and in this case do you understand better when taking notes longhand versus using a laptop. The results do not indicate that it matters, but this is not why you take notes anyway. You don’t take notes and then take a test. You take notes over a period of time, study your notes, and then take a test. The delay and the amount of material are the reality faced by students.
My recommendation goes further and involves a combination of recording and note-taking only available on a digital device (see my description of SoundNote). This app allows the taking of notes, but records the audio in the background and time stamps each note to a location in the audio. This combination makes it easy to listen to sections of the audio when the notes that exist are not adequate. This would work would also benefit from the research finding that laptop users take more notes.
