I became interested in what I now describe as the great keyboarding versus handwritten note-taking controversy after I had retired from my career as an educational psychologist and I could no longer conduct research. I had studied student note-taking and related topics intended to improve student performance so I had experiences that seemed relevant. As retired people do, I looked for things to do that interested me and came across a book study group reading about personal knowledge management (PKM). These folks were old school so I learned about Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten slip-based (think note card) system for storing, organizing, and applying notes over an extended period of time. The topic of whether implementations among lifelong learners such as the members of this group should use handwritten notes stored or modernized versions of the Zettelkasten stored digitally (think Obsidian) came up frequently again raised the handwriting vs. keyboarding controversy.
Unless they follow the research carefully, it is my impression that high school teachers and college profs are getting the message that learners are better off if they require students to take notes by hand. The issue is that learners’ attention can wander when they are online and have a device, but the most persuasive argument seems to be that learners, no matter how distractible, achieve greater understanding when taking notes by hand. I have tried to summarize the limitations of the handwriting is better argument in previous posts.
The desirability difficulty hypothesis
Why would this be the case? The most common explanation is based in the observation that students can record more information when using a keyboard because a keyboard tends to be faster than handwriting. On the surface, this difference might seem to advantage students who take notes on a tablet or laptop, as students who enter information faster would seem better able to keep up with a lecturer.
The desirable difficulty hypothesis is used to reach a different conclusion (Bork and Bork, 2011. Desirable difficulty is a learning condition that makes practice feel more effortful and often makes performance look worse in the moment, but improves long-term retention and transfer. It can apply in many areas (e.g., do you highlight or take notes when you read), but here is based on the proposal that the slower rate of handwritten notes in the context of the demanding rate of information presentation in a lecture forces students to make decisions about what they will get down on paper. They argue that students focus on the most important information and rework the auditory input in their own words. When writing about another of my personal interests, I would describe this as a generative rather than a passive process (verbatim notes). It always struck me that those who take notes using keyboards actually have more time to think rather than less and this assumes they ignore this advantage by being lazy.
If you have read Thinking fast and slow (Kahneman) you have encountered the researcher’s distinction between System 1 and System 2 thinking. Fast thinking is by definition, fast and effortless and slow thinking is deliberate and effortful. Kahneman probably wouldn’t conclude that we are by nature lazy thinkers, but he does claim that the default is to cognitive behavior that is fast to conserve mental energy. We have to make a deliberate effort to override this tendency. In this situation, unless learners purposefully summarize and personalize as they take notes, the default will be to record what you can. Handwriters are forced into thinking because of the greater stress they are under. They have no choice. Perhaps keyboarders could function differently, but don’t know or don’t care.
There are options to reduce the stress (the audio recording option) and create more effective notes when working with a computer or tablet.
As I have thought more about this I now wonder why the PKM folks use the same handwriting during lecture explanation to do the work they do. They are typically reading and, if listening to podcasts or YouTube, but have access to the pause button. Perhaps more to my issue with the desirable difficulty explanation for greater generative processing and the recommendations for the PKM folks to take their notes by hand is the lack of reasoning as to why desirable difficulty would even apply when you read. It might apply to something like highlighting versus taking notes, but given the control available to the reader, how would it relate to taking notes? If working memory was being overloaded by some combination of reading and taking notes, how would that work? You can’t do both at the same time. I have been trying to find research studies on keyboarding versus handwriting as applied to text content, but there seems to be very, very little.
The one study I could find (Shoen) was a graduate program thesis comparing handwritten and keyboarded notes from an “equivalent” audio and text source. The researcher made the same comment I just made about the lack of studies comparing typewritten (his term) and handwritten notes from text. The researcher found a main effect showing the advantage of “typed” notes and even an interaction showing that handwritten notes from audio produced lower retention than the other groups. This study focused on the encoding effect rather than a storage benefit, meaning the posttest was given soon after an interference task rather than after an effort to let participants consider the benefits of studying the notes.
One related point. I am differentiating annotation of written content from taking notes. My rationale is that writing a few words in the margins which can occur when reading a book is quantitatively and qualitatively different from adding a note to text content when using a digital reading platform such as a Kindle. There are not restrictions because of space and a very different opportunity to review (search, rework. etc) notes taken digitally.
Summary
This post focuses mainly on the desirable difficulty argument as an explanation for the superiority of handwritten notes. More specifically, I try to argue that those interested in taking notes from text or video, as is the case with most of the note-taking by PKM enthusiasts has little support from those claiming that there is research showing the benefits of handwritten notes.
Sources
Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. Psychology and the real world: Essays illustrating fundamental contributions to society, 2(59-68), 56-64.
Kahneman, D., & Egan, P. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Schoen, Ian, “Effects of Method and Context of Note-taking on Memory: Handwriting versus Typing in Lecture and Textbook-Reading Contexts” (2012). Pitzer Senior Theses. Paper 20. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/pitzer_theses/20
