Be smart and write by hand

If students take notes by hand instead of using their laptops, they achieve better test results. Researchers from Princeton University and the University of California – Los Angeles write about it in the journal Psychological Science.

The students involved in the tests that psychologists Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer conducted, got separated into two groups: the ones that took hand written notes and the ones that used their laptop. When asked to do a test on the subject of the lecture, it became irrefutably clear that the analog writers got more out of the lectures.

The reason for this wasn’t, as you would expect, the great possibilities of distraction that laptops offer. It’s because notes on laptops are different from handwritten ones. Laptop users take long verbatim notes and people who write notes by hand have to process the information more thoroughly before they can write it down in shorter sentences.