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With all the apps and digital tools available to enhance your studying, plus how fast and easy it is to type notes, it seems like a no-brainer to bring your laptop with you to class. But it actually might be a no-brainer in the literal sense: There’s good reason to believe taking notes by hand and leaving your computer closed helps your brain retain more so you perform better overall. Here’s why you should try leaving the laptop behind at home.
Digital note-taking isn’t perfect
There’s been plenty of research that has suggested hand-taken notes are superior to those you take on a computer, even though typing is so much faster and you can get more information on the page. Actually, that’s part of the problem: When taking notes by hand, you have to be choosy about what is important enough to write down. You have to use critical thinking, make outlines, and listen closely to determine what parts of the lecture are valuable enough to take the time to jot down. When you’re typing, you can just transcribe the whole lecture in real time if you want—and you might go on autopilot to do so without engaging your brain deeply in the material.
Recent research to back up long-form note-taking as the reigning champ was published in Teaching of Psychology in 2022. Researchers put participants in four categories: Those who took notes by hand and took a test on the computer, those who took notes on the computer and took a test by hand, those who took notes and did a test on the computer, and those who did it all by hand. Overall, regardless of how they ultimately took the test, the students who took notes by hand did better on the quiz overall—and better on conceptual questions.
Your computer is distracting
It’s convenient to be able to look up concepts, jot down notes, and maintain tabs of supplemental materials throughout class, but it’s just as convenient to toggle over to a new window and scroll social media or send work emails. Being distracted in class is not helpful for your retention and performance, regardless of whether the tool at hand could help you if you were using it to.
A 2012 survey published in the Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning showed that of 478 students and 36 instructors surveyed at one university, almost half found the use of technology in class for noneducational purposes distracting. There have been a bunch of other studies showing that use of phones or laptops for noneducational purposes during class has a negative effect on academic performance. The journal articles on these results have pretty straightforward titles like “Dividing Attention in the Classroom Reduces Exam Performance” and make it clear that doing anything but taking notes or following along with class materials on the computer is only impacting your ability to obtain and retain valuable information.
And since taking notes on the computer isn’t all that great to begin with, you might as well not bring the device at all.
