I know that many argue the research demonstrates handwriting is superior to keyboarding when it comes to taking lecture notes. I have always taken the opposite position based on my personal experience. Here is a new take in support of my personal perspective.
Danial Willingham is one of the best cognitive researchers translating research findings for educators and the general public. He has a new 2023 book (Outsmart Your Brain) that offers very interesting analyses of learning challenges and solutions. Note-taking is one of the topics he addresses at length. What he has to say about the challenges of taking notes allows me to state my case. The topic also helps explain the book’s title.
Willingham cites research indicating that people speak six times faster than most can take notes. This reality in combination with the multiple cognitive processing tasks involved in taking notes places a learner in a difficult situation. By multiple processes, Willingham indicates that when taking notes, you must switch back and forth between what the lecturer is saying and showing and your notes. You must evaluate what you are hearing and seeing and decide what you should record. You must both attempt to understand what is being said and make the effort to record what you can. There are probably more skills, but this should be enough. The point is that there is not enough attention to go around and each student must make choices. Translating/paraphrasing is ideal, but when we are pressured our brain drifts toward writing as much as possible and that is easiest to do by writing exactly what was presented. It is as if the learner decides perhaps he or she can figure things out later.
Some who have supported taking notes by hand suggest that despite the reality that handwriting can record less than heyboarding to start with, this is actually a good thing because it requires learners to focus on the important content. This is sometimes described as desirable difficulty. The term sounds cool and it would fit with Willingham’s notion that our brain leads us to take the easy way rather than the most productive way. So the argument is when pressured those taking notes by hand take the more difficult path and as a consequence come out understanding more.
Just to be accurate. Willingham suggests students should take handwritten notes and refers to the existing research. Willingham is especially concerned that students can’t resist the temptation to open a second window and explore unrelated online content. The following explains why I disagree. Should you make things more difficult and make use of a notebook and pen?
Apps that record audio and synch with your notes
My personal experience has led me to read, annotate, and take presentation notes digitally. I have suggested doing this because it fits a long-term view of writing based on what I read and watch. My insight involved finding an efficient way to isolate useful information from many books and research articles for storage, organization, and retrieval months or years later. This is not the situation Willingham was describing.
For students, some digital note-taking tools are better suited to dealing with the multiple processing demands Willingham identifies than the traditional paper and pen. Willingham suggests students should decide before a lecture whether they want to understand more or write more. The tools I recommend allow the same decision but are far more forgiving when it comes to the consequences of this decision. The apps I have in mind simultaneously record audio while the user takes notes from a keyboard and with some tools a stylus. The notes and drawings are linked through time stamps to the audio. This connection and the related storage capabilities free the student from having to get as much down as possible. The audio provides a backup for information that is missed or is confusing at the pace of the presentation. It is not a necessity that the learning get as much as possible down on paper or screen in real-time. If the student wants to paraphrase, the audio is a backup. If the presentation results in so little understanding that nothing meaningful can be entered to be studied, just enter some ???? as a note and listen to the audio later when you have time to think.
What I am describing are not some recent innovations and I have never understood why students would take notes on a laptop or tablet and not use this type of software. BTW – I understand several of these apps now can generate transcription, but I am not proposing that transcription be used as a substitute for taking your own notes. The logic here is the same as taking notes even if the instructor provides access to notes or copies of any slides used in presentations. The process of generating your own representation of a presentation is helpful.
The following are some options I have used (other software with similar capabilities may exist). The tool you choose could depend on whether you want a free app or pro options such as online storage, whether you want to combine text and drawings in your notes, and whether additional features are useful to you for tasks other than taking class notes.
The following image is the interface for Soundnote.
The following video offers a description of using Soundnote.
Source
Willingham, D. T. (2023). Outsmart your brain: Why learning is hard and how you can make it easy. Simon and Schuster.
