If you’ve spent any time reading about study strategies, you’ve probably encountered some version of this claim: writing notes by hand is better than typing them on a laptop. There seems to be or at least there is reported to be research to back it up. I am normally a “what does the research suggest” guy, but in this case, I am skeptical and find my own experience leads me to a different conclusion.
I try to be careful in thinking through whether any research study matches well with learner behavior in applied settings. To do this, you need to do more than read the abstract or even the discussion section from published studies. You certainly need to do more than read the analyses from “thought leaders” who have only read this content or asked AI to offer an opinion. Here is why. Researchers are free to speculate a bit in pushing an interpretation in these parts of a journal article. Readers should know this and take this into account. The section of the article, expected to be objective and descriptive, is the Methods section. Think of your role as a research consumer like this: here is exactly what he/she did and the results that these experiences produced. Now interpret them yourself given what you know about existing research and knowledge of the Methods and Results in this study. What conclusions do you reach?
Here are some issues I think are important to consider when researching keyboard versus handwritten note-taking. I have ordered this list from most to least influential based on my perception of what matters most when considering what a given study offers for applied note-taking. Don’t take this ranking too seriously, but think about the impact the issues I identify might have.
Look for this issue in the Methods section.
Does the study focus on taking notes from a live lecture? The experience of taking notes from written material or a recorded source is different. You can pause and do not have to experience the working memory overload argued to trigger the more generative processing required to counter the slower process of handwriting? I include this item because so many adults have become interested in Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) strategies and are exposed to summaries of the research on notetaking. The PKM people seem more likely to take notes in response to what they read than students.
Does the study allow a reasonable amount of time to review notes? Does the experiment allow note review or does it focus on learning during the lecture only? What you learn during the input experience is not the entire learning opportunity.
Does the study involve a significant delay between exposure to content and before the collection of the dependent variable? Is the performance data collected as part of the same research session as the input experience?
Is intermediate processing of notes allowed or encouraged? Looking over notes immediately after taking them is a good strategy for students.
Is the digital experience limited to the original input of information? I encourage lecture focused note takers to use an app that records audio while taking notes. Such apps link notes with the audio. This allows gaps or vague notes to be remediated from the time-linked audio in a very efficient manner. Missing something doesn’t have to be permanent and technology allows an easy way to address this issue.
An example of how I analyze a screen/paper study
I have read a large proportion of the published studies comparing keyboard and pen notetaking and have frequently written about my opinions on this matter. I decided to create this post after encountering an oft-cited study I had missed and in reading this study found some of the issues I have just mentioned. Comments related to this specific study may offer additional insights into what I think is being missed.
A 2018 study by Luo, Kiewra, Flanigan, and Peteranetz compared laptop and longhand note-taking and arrived at conclusions that many educators have taken as gospel. Laptop note takers, the study found, tend to transcribe lectures verbatim. They capture more words and paraphrase less. The researchers argue that longhand note takers, constrained by writing speed, are forced to be selective – to summarize and to impose structure. When students later reviewed their notes, the longhand group outperformed the laptop group on achievement measures. The takeaway seemed clear: put down the laptop and take your notes on paper.
But here’s the problem. The study, like many in this line of research, created conditions that almost no student would actually encounter in a real academic setting. And in doing so, the researchers may have reached conclusions that say more about experimental design than about how learning actually works.
What Happens After You Take Notes?
Think about your own experience as a student. Did you ever just take notes during a lecture and then re-read them once before a test? Maybe. But more likely, you did something with those notes afterward. You reorganized them. You filled in gaps possibly be asked to look at a friend’s notes. You rewrote messy sections. You looked up concepts you didn’t understand and added explanations. You highlighted key ideas, drew connections between topics, or created study guides.
These processes – note modification and active review – are where much of the real learning happens. And it’s precisely the step that the Luo et al. study skipped nearly entirely.
In the study, the review condition gave students just 15 minutes to passively reread their notes. No editing. No reorganizing. No supplementing. Just reading what they had already written. Under those conditions, of course longhand notes performed better as a review product – they already contained generative features like paraphrasing and images baked in from the encoding phase. Laptop notes, full of verbatim transcription, offered little additional cognitive benefit from a simple reread. Also, both the learning and the study phases happened back to back. There may be a few situations in which students are tested immediately following exposure to new information but such situations are not where the major portion of student grades are determined.
But this isn’t how students use notes in practice. The laptop note taker’s comprehensive, transcription-heavy notes aren’t a finished product – they’re a first draft intended to be a first draft revisited over time. First drafts are meant to be revised and complete notes allow both further exploration and are more likely to be meaningful after a delay of days and weeks.
The Laptop’s Advantage
Here’s what’s ironic about the study’s findings: the very feature it criticizes – the completeness of laptop notes – is actually a significant advantage when students are allowed to modify their notes and revist them after multi-day delays.
Research on note modification consistently shows that students who revise, reorganize, and elaborate on their notes achieve more than students who simply review them passively. And the richer the initial record, the more material students have to work with during revision. Laptop note-takers, with their more complete capture of lecture content, have a larger, more detailed foundation for generative processing after the fact.
Moreover, laptops offer affordances for modification that longhand simply cannot match. Affordances is a term researchers like to use to refer to possibilities a system makes available. When you have a more complete body of content to work with and this content can easily be reorganized and extended. The generative activity can occur when the learner is less challenged with a rapid input of information and has time to reflect and maybe recall other bits and pieces (a reason reviewing your notes after class is useful).
This study did note that laptop note takers recorded far fewer images than longhand note takers, and this contributed to lower achievement on image-related test items. But this deficit is entirely addressable. Students can take screenshots of lecture slides, paste in diagrams, or create their own visual representations during a modification phase. I acquired this approach while attending conference sessions, and I was surprised when my own students seemed unaware that it was allowed. After being frequently asked to wait so students could draw something from one of my PowerPoint slides into their notes, I offered this advice. I also just made my slides available in our course management system, but that is an entirely separate issue regarding the consequences this practice has. Maybe in another post. The fact that they didn’t capture images in real time doesn’t mean those images are lost forever.
It’s Not About the Medium—It’s About the Strategy
Perhaps the most important insight from note-modification research is this: the debate between laptop and longhand is entirely the wrong debate. What matters isn’t the tool students use to take notes – it’s the strategy they employ before, during, and after note-taking.
The Luo et al. study captured students using their default, untrained behaviors. Laptop users defaulted to transcription because they could. Longhand users defaulted to selectivity and paraphrasing because they had to. Neither group was taught how to take notes strategically, and neither group was given the opportunity to do anything meaningful with their notes afterward.
When students are trained in effective note-taking and modification strategies, the medium effect largely disappears. A laptop user who transcribes during the lecture and then spends time paraphrasing, reorganizing, and adding visual representations is engaging in just as much – if not more – generative processing as a longhand user who paraphrased during encoding but never revisits the notes.
What This Means for Students and Educators
The research isn’t wrong about what it measured. But what it measured isn’t what students actually experience. Any study that freezes the note-taking process at the moment of initial recording and calls it complete is telling only half the story. And in education, half the story can lead to entirely the wrong conclusions. Read the Methods section or follow education bloggers who do.
Reference
Luo, L., Kiewra, K., Flanigan, A., and Peteranetz, M. (2018). Laptop versus longhand note taking: Effects on lecture notes and achievement. Instructional Science 46(6), 947-971.
Note-taking is a foundational skill that supports comprehension, retention, and critical thinking. However, many students below high school age struggle to develop effective note-taking habits on their own. There is comparatively little research on the development of note-taking skills in K12 compared to higher education, and within K12, the development of note-taking skills in elementary and middle schools receives extremely little attention. Still, from typically fourth grade on, it is commonly accepted that the goal in reading skills switches from learning to read to reading to learn.
While I have always been interested in note-taking research and practice, my wife and I worked with a second-grade teacher to explore our early ideas about the creation of multimedia projects as learning opportunities. Pam Carlson, our elementary teacher colleague, was preparing her students to participate in what we called the butterfly project, in which they were learning about the life stages of butterflies, migration, and other relevant topics related to butterflies. Students were creating a HyperCard stack to share what they had learned, and each student selected a specific butterfly to describe in the card they created for the stack. In reviewing various books Pam provided students as resources, she offered the following instructions to guide the information students wrote down. When you find something you want to include, she suggested, think about that information carefully and then turn your book over so you will write down what you learned without copying from the book. I could rephrase her instructions in the way researchers would describe the goals of her required strategy (summarization, personalization, generative processing, etc.) when I taught or wrote about note-taking, but these concrete instructions still pop into my memory when I address the topic.
This post summarizes the few studies I was able to locate that I thought would be relevant to educators who work with younger students and I will try to describe what seems to me to be the implications for classroom implementation. As always, more work is needed. One basic observation that probably seems obvious to most educators, the studies I reference here, Ilter (2017), Lee et al. (2013), and Chang & Ku (2014), highlight the importance of explicit instruction and scaffolded strategies to help young learners master note-taking skills. An interesting generality about note-taking seems to be that while nearly all learners take notes in some form or another, few of any age experience direct instruction and evaluation of this important skill.
Below, you will find key recommendations from these studies to help educators guide their young students toward becoming capable note-takers.
1. Explicit and Scaffolded Instruction of Note-Taking Strategies
One of the most important takeaways from the research is that note-taking skills should not be left to chance. Ilter (2017) emphasizes the need for early and explicit instruction in note-taking, starting in elementary school. Students often lack the intuitive ability to identify key information or organize their notes effectively, so educators must provide clear guidance.
Scaffolding is a critical component of this instruction. As the word implies, scaffolds are supports offering structure. A partial outline makes a reasonable example. Teachers should begin by modeling note-taking strategies and gradually shift responsibility to students as they gain confidence. For example, early lessons might involve guided practice with teacher feedback, while later lessons encourage students to take notes independently. This gradual release of responsibility ensures that students build the skills they need to succeed on their own.
2. Writing in Their Own Words
One of the biggest challenges for young students is avoiding verbatim copying. As I previously mentioned, Pam Carlson’s strategy for her second-grade students is noteworthy. Ilter (2017) and Lee et al. (2013) stress the importance of teaching students to paraphrase information in their own words. This practice not only improves comprehension but also helps students engage more deeply with the material. A related skill was brevity. One researcher liked the label “terse”. So, the goal was not just to paraphrase, but to focus on key or interesting ideas.
To support this skill, educators can:
Model how to paraphrase by thinking aloud during lessons. A think-aloud is simply an effort to externalize your thinking. It is a common strategy suggested to help learners get a grasp on mental behaviors they cannot see.
Provide practice exercises where students rewrite sentences or paragraphs in their own words.
Emphasize the value of organizing information logically, rather than simply copying it.
By focusing on paraphrasing and organization, students can develop a more meaningful understanding of the material they are studying.
3. Guided and Partial Graphic Organizers
Lee et al. (2013) highlight the benefits of using guided notes and partial graphic organizers to support young learners. Researchers often use the label “scaffolding” to describe this strategy. The goal is to offer guidance and reduce the “cognitive load” beginners face with a new skill. These tools reduce cognitive load by helping students focus on the most important information, rather than trying to capture everything at once.
For example:
Provide students with partially completed notes that include blanks for them to fill in during a lesson.
Use written prompts to guide students in identifying main points, summarizing content, and organizing their notes.
These strategies are particularly effective for elementary students, who may struggle to process and record information simultaneously. By reducing the mental effort required, guided notes and graphic organizers allow students to concentrate on understanding the material.
4. Focusing on Key Ideas, Keywords, and Text Structures
Chang & Ku (2014) emphasize the importance of teaching students to identify and use key ideas, keywords, and text structures in their notes. Their research with 4th graders provides several practical strategies for educators:
Highlighting Main Ideas: Teach students to use titles, headings, and guiding questions to identify the most important information in a text.
Recognizing Keywords: Help students identify function words like “however,” “because,” and “therefore,” which signal relationships between ideas.
Using Visual Aids: Introduce charts, diagrams, and other visual tools to represent similarities, differences, and other relationships. For example, how are moths and butterflies the same and different?
Analyzing Text Structures: Teach students to recognize organizational patterns, such as sequences or classifications. Is the author describing the steps in a process or the characteristics of a phenomenon or concept you should list in your notes.
These strategies not only improve the quality of students’ notes but also enhance their ability to understand and retain information.
5. Practice and Feedback
Finally, practice and feedback are essential for developing strong note-taking skills. Ilter (2017) recommends providing students with ample opportunities to practice taking notes independently. This practice should be paired with regular feedback from teachers and peers to help students refine their techniques.
For example:
After a lesson, ask students to share their notes with a partner and discuss what they found most important.
Provide specific feedback on how students can improve their notes, such as by adding more keywords or organizing information more clearly.
Encourage students to revise their notes based on feedback and reflect on what they learned.
By creating a supportive environment where students can practice and receive constructive feedback, educators can help them build confidence and competence in their note-taking abilities.
The Integrated Process
Itar suggests a sequence educators can follow in working with students to develop these skills.
The Five-Step Instructional Model for Note-Taking
Ilter (2017) introduces a structured five-step approach to teaching note-taking, which can be applied to both reading and listening tasks. This model provides a clear framework for students to follow, making the process of taking notes more manageable and effective.
Step 1: Identify the Main Idea
Students should learn to highlight or underline important information and paraphrase it in their own words. Teaching them to use textual clues, such as headings or topic sentences, can help them pinpoint the main idea without resorting to verbatim copying.
Step 2: Information Reduction
Encourage students to condense paragraphs into essential points. This step helps them avoid excessive copying and focus on the most critical information.
Step 3: Keyword Identification
Teach students to recognize keywords that signal relationships between ideas, such as “because,” “however,” or “finally.” These words can help students understand the structure of the information and create meaningful connections in their notes.
Step 4: Use of Representations
Introduce visual tools like symbols, charts, diagrams, or graphic organizers to help students organize their notes. These representations make it easier to see relationships between ideas and improve recall.
Step 5: Analysis of Text Structures
Help students recognize text structures, such as headings, subheadings, sequences, and classifications. Understanding these structures allows students to organize their notes more effectively and see how different pieces of information fit together.
Summary
This post is intended as an extension of my previous posts on note-taking focused on academic settings and younger learners. Beginning in approximately fourth grade, learners both read to learn and listen to brief teacher presentations. The skills of taking notes is an important life skill seldom directly taught to learners of any age. Researchers are proposing and describing how elementary and middle school teachers can help students begin to develop these skills.
References
Chang, W., & Ku, Y. (2014). The effects of note-taking skills instruction on elementary students’ reading. The Journal of Educational Research, 108(4), 278–291.
Ilter, I. (2017). Notetaking skills instruction for development of middle school students’ notetaking performance. Psychology in the Schools, 54(6), 596-611
Lee, P., Lan, W., Hamman, D. & Hendricks, B. (2008). The effects of teaching notetaking strategies on elementary students’ science learning. Instructional Science, 36(3), 191–201.
Google recently offered NotebookLM users an exciting opportunity. Personal Notebooks can now be shared with others. The shared version is read-only, so the curator need not worry that unknown individuals could modify the existing work. Collaborative use of such a tool would represent a different opportunity.
I have written multiple posts focused on note-taking, collaborative note-taking, and the focus of AI on personal notes. These posts were related to, but a side focus of a career as an academic investigating study behavior and examining the application of cognitive theories of learning to taking notes. In a way, I have taken notes for years, focused on note-taking research. I have access to digital notes and highlights associated with hundreds of journal articles and books.
In a recent post, I described my approach to uploading a large body of these notes into NotebookLM, and now I can offer this content to any interested individual. I encourage you to take a look. What might be unique about my content is the amount of material and the personal process of generating this content through annotation and highlighting. My hope is that others will make similar offers.
When you use the link I provide (end of post), you will encounter the following interface. Ignore the references to Obsidian — this is the tool I use to accumulate digital content. This material was uploaded to NotebookLM. Try chatting with my content — green box in the middle, or use some of the suggestions made under the rightmost Studio column. I accumulated content mostly focused on study behavior, classroom applications of technology, and reading skills.
Here is a sample prompt you might try — How does the effectiveness of taking notes on paper compare with taking notes using a digital device?
Here is the link for access. It is not necessary, but if you have a reaction, I would appreciate a comment. Again, I think there is an opportunity for sharing here and hope offering my notes will provide an example.
I have highlighted much of what I read for probably 50 years. I started in college, and I tried different approaches, sometimes highlighting with different colors. My preference was the slim highlighter in yellow. When I began reading using my phone, iPad, and Kindle, I learned how to highlight using these devices. My interest in educational technology led me to look more deeply into the opportunities to highlight and annotate on these devices, and you may have read what I have had to say about these tools in previous posts.
Here is the thing about highlighting. If you follow the research on the efficacy of different learning/study strategies, you soon understand that highlighting is not particularly useful. I knew this too, and I was interested in study techniques long before personal computers were a thing. I taught educational psychology to college students, and studying was a topic I hoped the students would find relevant.
There are good reviews of the research on highlighting (Dunlosky, et al, 2013) that reach the conclusion that highlighting has low utility. I think it is important to carefully understand the methodology used in the studies that investigate highlighting. What is the breadth of the perspective? In research that examines the application of note-taking, a distinction is drawn between the generative and external functions of notes. I think a similar issue applies here. The research indicates highlighting is not cognitively active and has limited generative value, but what about external storage? If it was an hour before a major test and I was trying to review the 120 pages that were assigned in my textbook, I would rather I had highlighted that book than not.
Here are some of the major findings that challenge the value of highlighting.
Highlighting may improve recall but not comprehension. (see Ponce and colleagues resource as the source for most of the comments focused on recent studies of highlighting)
Learner-generated highlighting can improve memory for the highlighted material. However, this memory boost often doesn’t extend to improved comprehension. If this distinction makes little sense, think of the difference in terms of the types of questions that might be asked to evaluate memory versus understanding. College students seem to gain more memory benefit from self-highlighting than K-12 students, potentially because they are more experienced at identifying key information. Studies focused on the importance of content that is highlighted demonstrate that college students are better at identifying core or main ideas. This makes sense for a couple of reasons. First, highlighting tends not to be encouraged among K-12 students as they use books that are not theirs. Second, college students are more experienced with the educational process and have a better feel for what content is likely to be the focus of future examinations or projects they will complete. As a consequence, and anticipating that advanced learners are likely to make use of highlighting, instruction focused on the identification of priority information is often recommended. Younger students should be asked to highlight and the type of content they designate should be evaluated.
Illusion of Mastery: Like passive rereading, looking at highlighted text can create a false sense of familiarity, leading learners to believe they know the material better than they do. This confuses familiarity with actual retrievability and understanding (Johns).
When I explored highlighting as a study technique with my students, I described a similar phenomenon. I call it the “I’ll get to that later” effect. What I proposed is that students seem to actually identify important content (these are college students), but may be challenged to understand this material. An easy way to move on and complete the reading assignment was to highlight this material, but not stop to struggle with the ideas. Later may not actually happen, or if it does, the highlighted material is then encountered out of context and less easily processed to a deeper level.
Ahrens (citations appear at the end of this post) proposes that underlining (I would assume a practice similar to highlighting) is similar to what Ahrens classifies as fleeting notes. Fleeting notes are taken to quickly capture information, and the idea of smart notes that Ahrens emphasizes focuses on the translation of fleeting notes into smart notes. A smart note can stand alone to convey meaning to the note taker and others and requires the note taker to use personal knowledge to generate a note that is meaningful now and hopefully in the future.
Highlighting of digital material may be different.
Digital reading can be different. Highlights can be exported and saved isolated from the original document. The accumulation of this once-deemed potentially useful text can be searched and examined, or potentially can become the target of an AI chat years later. This is very different than the way we highlighted journal articles or books a decade or so ago. The journals and books were stored in long rows on our office shelves, with the highlighted prose unlikely to be discovered when useful. Some books while read, were returned to the library and not highlighted in the first place.
An Edutopia article on highlighting reached a negative conclusion about the value of highlighting (it may even hinder learning) and suggested solutions that educators should explain in a way very similar to that of the difference between fleeting and permanent notes. Those who are into Personal Knowledge Management methods for taking and retaining useful notes probably recognize this distinction. Ahrens suggested these terms as a way to identify important content (fleeting notes) with the expectation that this original material will receive further processing. He suggests that students a) annotate their highlights with short summaries and personal reflections or b) generate questions related to the content they have highlighted.
The Edutopia suggestions bring me to the perspective I want to emphasize.
Technology-based reading offers advantages over paper-based reading that are seldom emphasized. I rely heavily on highlighting when I write on my Kindle or using a browser extension that allows me to highlight web content. I don’t read from paper much anymore, but when I do, I also highlight a lot. When I use my iPad or computer to read and highlight, I tend to be using tools that allow me to add annotations (actually extended additions I would prefer to describe as notes) as part of the same integrated approach. I suppose I could read from a paper source and have a notebook on my desk at the same time, but I have never actually worked in this way. These highlights and notes are part of the original documents, but can also be exported for storage and further processing.
When I used to take notes from a highlighted book or journal article, it was usually later in some process of reviewing material in preparation to write something myself. In thinking about how I work now, I propose that reading using a technology-supported environment encourages the process of creating meaningful notes earlier in the process of writing, and is often disconnected from the process of creating the end product. There is an efficiency when meaningful notes are made during the initial process of reading new content in comparison to trying to create the same context when trying to make sense of highlights or notes that simply move unprocessed words from one paper source to another after a delay.
Here is my major use of the highlights from what I have read. As an academic researcher I read many, many journal articles. For the last 15 years of my career and since, I did my academic reading on the pdfs of these articles. Like other academics, I had access to these pdfs from pretty much any journal I wanted and I used these pdfs even when I owned the journals and they were on the shelf across the office from my desk. The tools I used to keep a record of the PDFs I read (originally to access the citations for articles) and to highlight these documents changed over the years, but I generated a large collection (hundreds) of highlighted articles. In recent years, I have been able to export the highlights and annotations and store this material using a personal knowledge management tool (Obsidian on my desktop and Mem.AI online). This large collection of has become a resource I can explore, link and tag. In the past couple of years, I have been able to chat with my content using AI tools (e.g., NotebookLM and Smart Connections). The opportunity being able to interact with material I have generated over decades is a very interesting experience and for someone who writes a boon to productivity,
Given the opportunities of reading on a digital device, I think we are at a point where highlighting may have value. Under these conditions, highlighting services as a placeholder for what should be a fairly immediate generation of meaningful notes. The placeholder has two benefits — it marks and saves a location in content that offers the benefit of context should a reader need to make use of the source material later. The marked material is also isolated through highlighting, and this would seem to benefit the note-making process.
One other conclusion for the Ponce and colleagues review of highlighting studies I drew from in previous sections of this post. These authors concluded that the effectiveness of highlighting was greatly enhanced when used in conjunction with more generative learning strategies, such as note-taking or creating graphic organizers. Combining highlighting with these activities showed a notably larger effect size compared to highlighting alone
I suggest it is time to prepare secondary students for these opportunities. I also argue that educators abandon the paper is best assumption. If learning is understood as a process with initial exposure not isolated from studying and review, I cannot see how paper sources have an advantage. Learn to use a digital highlighting and annotation tool and work this tool into your knowledge generation and storage workflow.
Highlighting has often been dismissed as an effective learning strategy. Here, I argue that this is an outdated perspective based on assumptions related to the use of paper-based content. With digital content, highlighting can be an important first step in the processing of content for comprehension and value over extended periods of time.
Sources
Ahrens, S. (2017). How to take Smart Notes: One simple technique to boost writing, learning and thinking for students, academics and nonfiction book writers
Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the public interest, 14(1), 4–58.
Johns, A. (2023). The science of reading: Information, media, and mind in modern America. In The Science of Reading. University of Chicago Press.
Ponce, H. R., Mayer, R. E., & Méndez, E. E. (2022). Effects of learner-generated highlighting and instructor-provided highlighting on learning from text: A meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 34(2), 989-1024.
This post assumes you understand the basics of what is referred to as the “writing process” and perhaps have read my previous post explaining what the writing process is and why it is valuable to educators and researchers. One additional role I proposed in that post was that the components of the writing process would be helpful in identifying technology tools that would support the various components of the Writing Process. This post identifies these tools and explains how they might be applied.
Before I get to my effort to associate specific technology tools with specific writing processes, I thought it useful just to make a case for writing using a word processor. The benefits are too easy to overlook, and opportunities may be ignored.
I assume you complete many of the writing tasks you take on using a word processing application. Do you do this because you assume this approach makes you more efficient or do you assume this approach makes you a better writer? Maybe you have never even thought about these questions. However, when functioning as a teacher and asking your students to engage in activities in a particular way, it may be helpful to consider why the approach you expect students to use will be productive. Often, to realize the full potential of an activity, the details matter and some insight into why an approach is supposed to be productive may be helpful in understanding which details to track and emphasize. The following comments summarize some ideas about the value of word processing and of learning to write using word processing applications.
In learning, as in other areas of life, you seldom get something for nothing. Still, a logical case has been proposed for how simply working with word processing for an extended period may improve writing skills and performance. One interesting proposal by Perkins (1985) is called the “opportunities get taken” hypothesis. The proposal works like this. Writing by hand on paper has a number of built-in limitations. Generating text this way is slower, and modifying what has been written comes at a substantial price. To produce a second or third draft requires the writer to spend a good deal of time reproducing text that was fine the first time, just to change a few things that might sound better if modified. Word processing, on the other hand, allows writers to revise at minimal cost. You can pursue an idea to see where it takes you and worry about fixing syntax and spelling later. Reworking documents from the level of fixing misspelled words to reordering the arguments in the entire presentation can be accomplished without crumpling up what has just been painstakingly written and starting over.
What Perkins proposed was that writers can take risks and push their skills without worrying that they may be wasting their time. The capacity to save and load text from some form of storage makes it possible to revise earlier drafts with minimal effort. Writers can set aside what they have written to gain new perspectives, show friends a draft and ask for advice, or discuss an idea with the teacher after class, and use these experiences to improve what they wrote yesterday or last week. What we have described here are opportunities—opportunities to produce a better paper for tomorrow’s class and, over time, opportunities to learn to communicate more effectively. The same is true for writing outside of an academic setting. Is not a bad idea to set a written product aside and then return to read it once more before sending it off. Often, errors become apparent and new ideas surface.
Do writers take the opportunities provided by word processing programs and produce better products? The research evaluating the benefits of word processing (Bangert-Drowns, 1993) is not easy to interpret. Much seems to depend on the experience of the writer as a writer and technology user and on what is meant by a “better” product. If the questions refer to younger students, it also seems to depend on the instructional strategies to which the students have been exposed. It does appear that access to word processing is more beneficial for older learners. General summaries of the research literature (Bangert-Drowns, 1993) seem to indicate that students make more revisions, write longer documents, and produce documents containing fewer errors when word processing. However, the spelling, syntactical, and grammatical errors that students tend to address and the revision activities necessary to correct them are considered less important by many interested in effective writing than changes improving document content or document organization. The natural tendency of most writers appears to be to address surface level features. This is especially true with less capable writers.
Writers appear to bring their writing goals and habits to writing with the support of technology. Beginning writers and perhaps writers at many stages of maturity may not have the orientation or capabilities to use the full potential of word processing, and their classroom instruction may also emphasize the correction of more obvious surface errors. Thus, there are typically improvements in the products generated when working with word processing tools, but the areas in which younger writers seem to improve are not necessarily the most important ones
Tools specific to writing components
Here are the types of tools we see as supporting individual writing processes. We list tools using general terms as specific examples of a given category come and go. Our online resources include more detailed information about specific tools you might try.
Planning – Research
Authors write based on what they know and what they can discover. What they discover could come from books, conversations with others, data collection and analysis, or Internet searches. Internet searches are a common practice, and some writing environments embed search access within the writing environment and even suggest topics and links based on the content being written. Of course, opening a browser or a second tab when writing in a browser in order to conduct a search is a simple matter. For those of us writing in specialized areas and needing source material such as scientific sources more powerful fused search tools are available and it seems new ones emerge daily. Google Scholar provides access to the resources I cite. I can search for research publications on a specific topic and use a hit on a useful resource to locate even more recent sources that cite the initial find. There no restrictions or subscriptions that apply to Google Scholar so there is no reason to not give it a try. Research Rabbit, LitMaps, Semantic Scholar, and several similar tools compete for the attention of researchers.
Locating information to be used in a future project or to improve an existing project also typically involves temporary storage of content and the information necessary for the attribution of useful sources. There are certainly nondigital ways to accomplish these tasks. Information could be entered in a notebook. There are now many digital tools that can be generalized to store notes or are specialized in some way. Writing systems may have built-in note taking, storage, and organization tools. Perhaps you have taken notes on cards. There is a digital equivalent. Scrivener is a writing environment and like writing tools, you would be more likely to have used is really a combination of tools. These “cards” can be organized and reorganized and offer the advantage of being searchable and other opportunities not available in the paper equivalent; e.g., copy and paste from source content, search, audio or image storage, duplication and off-site storage of resources so the work completed is not lost. The idea is that you can accumulate these “notes” and then organize them for use as you write.
Perhaps you just use a notebook to accumulate notes as you prepare for a writing task. There are many tech tools that serve a similar function and offer some enhancements not available with paper resources. Apple Notes comes with the Apple OS and iOS so that you can access your notes across Apple devices. Apple has taken to describing this tool as a way to store “forever notes”. With what could be unlimited storage, why discard notes after the project the notes were intended to support is finished? Perhaps the notes might be useful in the future. To make this practical, the tool must be capable of more than storage. You need to be able to find what you stored when useful and this involves powerful search, tags, and collections. There are many tools based on a similar concept (e.g., Evernote, OneNote, Notion, Google Keep).
Ideas as building blocks
One subcategory of note taking tools encourages the isolation of individual ideas or concepts. Think of note cards. I prefer to imagine Lego Blocks as ideas proposing that anyone familiar with these blocks appreciate how the blocks can be reused to build many different things. For those who are already familiar with what has become a popular self-improvement genre, the ideas as building blocks might alternately be described as smart notes, permanent notes, or atomic notes. For those really into this perspective on taking notes, there are differences among these terms, but all are similar enough I am not going to get into nuances. The atomic note is perhaps the most basic of these ideas and proposes that the note taker should create exactly one note for each idea, and write it as if you’re writing so you or someone else would understand this idea in the future. Use full sentences, include references. What you get from this process over time is an accumulation of ideas (lego blocks) that you can organize in different ways to accomplish different tasks. Connections among these ideas are to be explored repeatedly over time and potential meaningful associations are to be stored with links or tags. There are two important ideas here – a) identify and store useful ideas and b) revisit your collection repeatedly overtime to identify interesting connections among these ideas.
My favorite tool for this style of notetaking is Obsidian. I might have also described Obsidian under a later heading (organization) because of the process of idea organization via links and tags, but the notion of saving isolated, but connectable concepts is so unique I decided to focus on it at this point. There are other ways to keep individual ideas both without technology (note cards), but the search and interconnection possibilities among other technology facilitated writing tools offer unique benefits over long periods of time and with a large amount of content..
Referencing
A bibliography generator is also helpful when creating a large project. Citation information from sources can be stored as the sources are being read and this makes the eventual compilation of a reference list far more efficient than attempting to assemble such a list when the project is nearing completion.
Planning – organization
Most students are familiar with outlining. Incorporating an outlining tool in a writing environment allows the writer to plan the structure of the document. Often the outline entries become headings within the document, and the writer can move back and forth between the outline view and the extended text as an aid to organizing a major project. This capability helps the writer to escape the detail level and regain a sense of the overall purpose and structure of a document which research on the writing process argues is a unique challenge. It helps the writer answer questions such as “Do I want to discuss this issue at this point or would it be better to address it at a later point?” It is also possible to reverse this process – write first and outline later. This is a way to examine the structure of what has been written with the potential outcome of moving content around to provide a more logical structure. Again, I note at this point that Google docs and Microsoft 365 will generate an outline based on the structure of headings that have been used in a document. This outline is quite useful when working with a long document to quickly locate segments you want to edit or adding some new content you have just discovered, but examining the structure of the outline is also helpful.
A tool often serving a similar function allows the writer to create what are called either concept or mind maps. A map consists of nodes representing ideas and links joining the nodes. As a college student, you may have encountered textbooks in which the author or authors incorporated concept maps to represent the organization of core ideas within each chapter. The idea was to help you understand the big picture by isolating the core ideas and to show how the core ideas are related. In this case, the map was intended to help you see the structure around which much additional information was probably organized. A concept mapping tool can provide a related benefit to an individual or group attempting to organize ideas for a project. The reader and writer both benefit from a well articulated structure; the reader in interpreting the product and the writer in creating the product.
The map including concepts (nodes) and a system of organization (links) need not be completed simultaneously. In a technique such as brainstorming, an individual or small group might first quickly throw out ideas that are represented as key terms or nodes. The concepts represented by the nodes might then be discussed, prioritized (some might be deleted), and structured (linked). Much in the way an outline identifies topics and subtopics, additional nodes might then be added and linked to specify details.
Translation and Editing – tools supporting content generation and simultaneous correction of writing errors.
Applications used in translation often incorporate tools to ease and correct the process. Such tools can check spelling, suggest appropriate words (dictionary, thesaurus), and identify faulty grammar. The editorial tools may signal suggestions automatically (e.g., misspelled words are underlined) or offer suggestions when assistance is requested. Grammarly is a great tool for identifying surface level errors. This may be the perfect example of a productivity tactic that simply could not be implemented when writing without technology. Even the free version of Grammarly will alert a writer to spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors and the paid version will both identify and make improvements. Grammarly implements these capabilities using AI and as with any AI use, it is important to consider whether AI limits the practice or development of an important skill. More on this topic at a later point
Tools that allow voice input would also fall within the translation category. While most of us have probably used voice input when engaged in tasks we would probably not define as writing (asking a question through the Amazon Echo or Apple Siri, requesting a search through Google, sending a text that serves as a note while driving), text input is available as a way to generate the initial input when engaged in more traditional writing activities. It is a different experience and messy, but it is worth exploring.
Reviewing
My comments when describing the components of the writing process model differentiated editing and revision with the primary distinction being what I would describe as depth – surface (e.g., spelling, grammar) and deep (e.g, organization and logic) and the time of changes made either delayed or immediately. Often the delay allows input from other individuals with perhaps the input from others more likely to encourage structural or logical improvements.
Reviewing – sharing
Sharing a draft allows the generation of feedback from someone other than the author. While this can be accomplished in many ways, the opportunities we want to identify here allow multiple individuals to access an online file. Depending on the service, the “editor” might then download the file for commenting or interact with the file online. Sharing printed copies has long been a possibility, but digital products allow greater convenience and a higher level of interactivity.
Reviewing – commenting
Some digital writing environments allow the author to specify constraints (permissions) that control the extent to which a reviewer can interact with the shared document. For example, the author might allow read only access, commenting (comments are not actual modifications of the existing text), or modification of the text (sometimes as suggestions that be accepted or rejected). Read only access would require that the editor provide feedback separated from the original document; e.g., comments in an email. Comments might be added as text or sometimes audio that is linked to specific locations in the original document, but are available to the author in a sidebar. Finally, actual modification of the text may be possible. Such modifications might involve the embedding of suggestions in the text. When I do this for my students, I usually change font color so the author can easily identify my recommendations. The most advanced systems even combine comments and suggestions. An editor can change the original document and offer a comment to explain the modification. The author can then review these comments and decide either to accept or reject each suggested change. Accepting a suggested change modifies the document. Rejecting a change returns the document to the state that existed before editing. Reviewing a suggested change even when rejected may encourage the author to generate a change more to the author’s liking. Note that the options we describe here are not available in all writing environments, but are also not hypothetical possibilities
Educators must consider how best to support the writer. For example, the educator may prefer to rely on comments rather than suggested revisions if it becomes obvious that the author is simply accepting everything the teacher proposes as an improvement rather than using the suggestions to guide rewriting.
AI facilitated writing
While I have already hinted at ways in which AI can be applied, this mentions have involved tools integrating AI in a limited way. You can turn this relationship around and allow the writer to control general AI services to perform a wide range of writing tasks and subtasks. What many educators most fear is that learners who need to develop writing skills or demonstrate their understanding of a topic through a writing assignment will simply turn over the task to AI with the engagement the teacher intended.
Such concerns are warranted. Early on (meaning a couple of years ago), I wanted to test how far I could push a general AI tool by seeing if I could get the tool to write an Introduction to Psychology textbook. I would describe the approach I took as AI first in which I worked through a process of steps I would take, but asked the AI tool to perform a step and then I evaluated and modified the effort produced. So, what are the topics or chapters that should appear in this type of textbook? Create an outline for the chapter on learning. Using the topics identified as behavioral theories of learning, expand these topics to explain each topic to the length of a typical college textbook and at that level off complexity. No one would be fooled by what was produced, but this was some time ago and with some work a product could be produced.
I am not advocating anything like this, but I do think I gained some insight from the process. To some extent, there were hints of the Writing Process components in what I was doing. Asking for an outline of topics I could consider was an alternative to my planning a structure on my own. My personal expertise does not extend to all of the topics covered by a survey course so asking for an outline for each chapter would likely identify topics I had not considered and would need to spend time investigating to guide what I might write in these areas. I did not ask for a review and edit of what I had AI generate for the samples I had AI create, but I have since explored how AI might be applied to perform such functions.
Perhaps my present position on AI would be to explore the role AI could play in performing or facilitating the performance of specific components of the writing process. I think it reasonable to investigate how I might work collaboratively with AI in performing these different processes. This seems different from recommending that AI should substitute for learning to perform these processes or maybe it could be imagined as a way to use AI to perform certain processes when a learner focuses on performing other processes.
Reference Bangert-Drowns, R. (1993). The word processor as an instructional tool: A meta-analysis of word processing in writing instruction. Review of Educational Research, 63 (1), 69–93.
I have become fascinated with what I now call linear narrative chains (Hays and colleagues, 2008). The phrase is appropriately descriptive in how we experience life including reading and listening to lectures and explains why reprocessing such inputs is important to understanding and learning. What the phrase indicates is that inputs come at us as a sequence of events and ideas. This is obvious when you consider reading a book or listening to a lecture, but it also applies to the events of daily life. One thing follows another.
An important insight related to learning is that what is stored when imagined by cognitive psychologists and to some extent supported by neuroscientists is best understood as a network with links among nodes differing in strength. It follows that some sort of processing and organization is necessary to get from the form of the input to the form of the storage.
When I first encountered this notion of changing information formats, I was reminded of something I used to present to my educational psychology classes. There appear to be different types of memory stores. What might be described as knowledge is stored as a web of concepts connected by links — semantic memory. We also store inputs using other formats, with the most relevant one for this description being episodic memories. I liked to describe episodic memories as stories as this was a convenient way to explain an approximation of this concept. We like stories, and the value of stories can be noted in the way we interact with others. Often, one person tells a story, and then the other individuals respond with a story of their own both to indicate they understand and to further the interaction. We often include stories in writing and teaching as a way to provide examples of ideas. Episodes are stored with our cognitive web linked with the abstract nodes of semantic memory.
Episodic memories (stories) have a time course or sequence. What I speculated about for my class was that stories are often processed into semantic memory and one of the issues with learning from experiences including class lectures was whether the lecture as story was processed into semantic memory. I asked about how students studied their notes and whether they repeatedly went through them and could even imagine where specific items, perhaps a graph, appeared in a location within their notebook. I suggested that this capability indicated at least some aspects of an episodic representation was being retained. The content stored in that fashion may not have been processed for understanding.
When are academic episodic representations converted? I suggested for some this may happen at the time of an exam. A question might refer to an example from class and ask for an application. If the class example had not been processed during the lecture or during study as related to a concept or principle, the student would have to go through this process of abstraction and organization in trying to answer the question.
External activities to encourage processing
I often write about generative activities — external tasks that change the probability of desirable cognitive behaviors involved in understanding and learning. The idea here is that we can understand and learn by self-imposed and self-guided thinking, but this may not happen for a variety of reasons. External tasks can be provided to increase probabilities. Questions are an easy example. Questions encourage different types of processing depending on the type of question. Some encourage recall, and others encourage application.
Some generative activities might have value in converting a linear input. Creating an outline requires a hierarchical organization of ideas. Something closer to the desired output as a web would be mind mapping or concept mapping. If you are unfamiliar, I would recommend Davies ( 2011) as a resource that would explain more than you probably want to know about mind mapping, concept mapping, and argument mapping. Among other things, I learned from this source was that there are differences among these tactics and many subtleties or variants of each. Some researchers and educators who apply concept maps go deep into fine details.
One differentiation among those who conduct concept mapping research (the general term I have always preferred) is whether maps are constructed by learners or constructed and provided by teachers/authors. Concept mapping assignments would be a type of generative activity and encourage the translation of a linear input into a representational web. The provision of a mind map in support of a linear narrative is different and is an attempt to show the structure that the presenter imagines as a way to encourage the learner to consider relationships among ideas that might expand whatever organization of ideas the learner had already established.
Smart notes and the creation of web structures
I am making a transition here that the uninitiated may have trouble following. Some of these who have made the study of note taking a serious focus have developed approaches that are quite different from the continuous paraphrasing and summarization that most learners use in recording notes in a notebook or on a laptop. I think of a smart note (a formal term as used here) as a concise note focused on a specific idea with enough context that it will still convey the original meaning at a future date to the note taker or others with a reasonable background. Think of a smart note as a building block that can then be combined with other smart notes in a cumulative way. The idea of specificity is that a given block can be combined with other such representations in a variety of ways. You can build different structures from different combinations of ideas. Notes are connected in several ways. Some of the possible connections can be attached as metadata — tags and links among notes.
Hopefully, the similarity between such notes and links and concept maps might now become apparent.
A web of notes within Obsidian
Obsidian is my personal note-taking tool, and it fits well with the idea of isolating specific ideas or concepts and then identifying connections between these specific notes over time. Rather than focus on using this tool as a learner, which has been the focus of multiple posts in the past, my intent here is more on the potential of sharing the structure of personal notes with others. So, in keeping with the theme of converting linear narrative chains, how might an instructor or author share the structure behind what they might present as a lecture or written product?
I briefly mentioned how a colleague who teaches history shares his background content with students in a previous post. Here, I want to describe the use of a mapping tool, Canvas, available as an extension to Obsidian. Obsidian includes its own tool for creating a map of notes and connections, but Canvas is more typical of what I have already described as a tool for concept mapping.
The following image shows a Canvas concept map I quickly created to show I might share the web of ideas that might be the basis for a couple of presentations I might offer describing the behavioral and cognitive models of learning. I had to find a workaround for the way Canvas was designed to work. The intention is that a Canvas web would show the entirety of notes. So, if you imagine a note consisting of a paragraph of content, you might have Canvas nodes representing concepts (as is the case in my example) linked with visible nodes containing entire paragraphs. This works fine if you are in control of a device as you can shrink and expand the content that appears on the screen very easily and expand a portion of the display if you need to make the paragraph larger so you can read it. I used a different approach, repurposing a typical text note as a node descriptor and then a link. The link would reveal the linked note layered on the basic map (second image).
To make this work in practice, you would have to pay for an Obsidian service ($8 a month) called Publish. Obsidian is a device-based tool, but Publish offers a web-based interface and storage option that allows others to view your Obsidian vault (a collection of notes).
There are likely multiple ways in which an individual could generate a shareable web experience for students. I have been focused on how I might do such a thing based on the note tool (Obsidian) I use. As another example example, in a previous post, I explored how Padlet could be used by a middle school or high school teacher to share a web of concepts and notes.
Summary
Students experience information as linear narrative chains even though the information within is likely based on a web of concepts and ideas. Since human memory is more web-like, the learner must transform a sequence of ideas to fit within his or her personal webs. Concept maps have been used to encourage the building of a personal web and can also be used for the author/teacher to share his/her web to assist in the construction of a personal representation. Note-taking tools based on the identification and linking of core ideas (Smart Notes) offer a related experience on the part of learners and possibly with some adaptations provide a way to share the structure the author/teacher used to generate their presentations.
Resources:
Ahrens, S. (2022). How to take smart notes: One simple technique to boost writing, learning and thinking.
Davies, M. (2011). Concept mapping, mind mapping and argument mapping: what are the differences and do they matter? Higher education, 62, 279-301.
Hay, D., Kinchin, I., & Lygo-Baker, S. (2008). Making learning visible: The role of concept mapping in higher education. Studies in Higher Education, 33(3), 295–311.
I recently read a research article (Cohen and colleagues, 2013) about students notetaking in college lectures that included interesting observations about the challenges students face. First, information comes at students quickly and to decide what to record and then manually recording what is selected is very demanding preventing little more than getting something down on paper or screen. The second challenge was what I found most interesting. The researchers proposed that students experience a linear flow of information that does not contain much of the structure of what the instructor is trying to communicate. The article proposed that students must try to create a structure after they leave the lecture hall and proposed one approach for doing so.
This comment got me thinking about a more general model of learning from textbooks and presentations. Lecturers and authors must generate a product that is experienced linearly – i.e., presentations and books. With the exception of headings and subheadings in written material, content creators have a structure in mind that guides the creation of what they produce, but is difficult to share. I read elsewhere a suggestion that a presentation should flow from an outline and the presenter should refer back to the outline from time to time to try to communicate this structure.
Thinking about the process perhaps at an even deeper level, I came up with the following representation. By increasing the complexity a bit, it might be possible to identify points of intervention.
So, this graphic is intended to suggest that the knowledge of a content creator is present is a cognitive network. To create a practical product for communication, the content creator has to transform aspects of this knowledge network into a hierarchically focused structure. I think an outline (physical or conceptual) is a good way to understand this transition step. This structured representation is then transformed into a linear representation that is shared in one way or another with an audience. As I suggested, a physical form of this outline may also be shared in some cases (the outline itself, or headings and subheadings). The learner then processes this input and from this processing, perhaps consisting of several steps, attempts to generate their own network of personal understanding.
The initial notetaking or perhaps highlighting would be a basic process and perhaps many students decide this will be sufficient. However, those who propose study skill or personal knowledge management strategies focus on what other activities might be added to improve retention and understanding.
What other activities can be added to recreate the structure intended by the content creator or formed in a more personalized way by the learner? Some of these “post-processing” activities may be familiar. For example, creating concept maps, sketchnoting, the left-hand column and summary of Cornell notes, and the proposal that students take class notes on the left-hand page or their notebook and save the right-hand page for follow-up recollections and additions would fit. All of these tactics involve at least basic connections if not hierarchical relationships.
For those interested in translating the processing of information from the perspective of personal knowledge management. You can substitute a “smart note” for a node in the concept map strategy and consider the similarity of links created among notes by tags and forward and backward links. The sharing of this structure as Obsidian makes possible with Obsidian Publish offers a way to share both information and more complex structure as externalized by a content creator.
I have a book club colleague, History Professor Dan Alosso, who is building something like this for his U.S. History class. The idea is not to replace lectures but to offer related content as organized by the lecturer. Dan writes and offers videos through Substack.
So, what are the points of intervention I mentioned? Certainly, study strategy advocates have many ideas about what processing stage of the model I suggest. The sharing of a structure during or after the exposure of students to content is less frequently explored.
Reference
Cohen, D., Kim, E., Tan, J., & Winkelmes, M. A. (2013). A Note-Restructuring Intervention Increases Students’ Exam Scores. College Teaching, 61(3), 95-99.
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