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5 min readlearning / training

Handwritten notes beat typed ones, but only if you review them

The question comes up in trainings: should I close the laptop and write by hand? The study people half remember says yes, and it is one of the most cited findings in learning science. Two preregistered replications of it found close to nothing. A 2024 meta-analysis of 24 studies did find a handwriting advantage worth 2 to 3 points on a course grade, and it shows up in students who go back and read their notes.

What the research shows.

Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer ran three experiments at Princeton and UCLA, with 67 to 151 participants each. Students watched TED talks, took notes on a laptop or in longhand, then answered factual and conceptual questions about half an hour later. Laptop note takers scored lower on the conceptual questions. The mechanism the authors proposed: laptop notes carried more verbatim overlap with the lecture, and verbatim overlap predicted worse performance. Their third experiment added a week's delay and let half the participants study their notes beforehand. Longhand plus study beat all three other conditions 1.

Morehead, Dunlosky and Rawson repeated that design in 2019 and added two groups, one taking notes on an eWriter and one told to take no notes at all. Performance did not differ in any consistent way across the groups, including the group that wrote nothing. Their meta-analysis across the direct replications leaned toward longhand with effects too small to call reliable 2.

In 2021 Heather Urry and a large team of co-authors ran a preregistered direct replication of the original Study 1 with 145 Tufts undergraduates. Quiz differences by medium came out small and statistically unreliable. Mini meta-analyses across eight comparable studies did not recover the conceptual advantage either 3.

That looked like the end of the story until Abraham Flanigan, Jordan Wheeler, Tiphaine Colliot, Junrong Lu and Kenneth Kiewra pooled 24 studies from 21 articles in 2024. Taking and reviewing handwritten notes produced higher achievement than typing: Hedges' g = 0.248, p < 0.001, with handwriting ahead in 88% of the comparisons. On a course averaging 75% with a standard deviation of 10 points, that shifts the mean by roughly 2 to 3 points. The same analysis found typing wins the volume contest by a wide margin, g = 0.919 4.

Two numbers pointing opposite ways. A keyboard captures more of the session. A pen produces a thinner record that survives better, once someone studies it. The condition in the meta-analysis is taking and reviewing, and most summaries of this literature drop the second half.

The screen costs about as much as the keyboard.

Susan Payne Carter, Kyle Greenberg and Michael Walker randomised computer access across classrooms of the introductory economics course at West Point. Final exam scores in classrooms that permitted computers landed 0.18 standard deviations below classrooms that banned them. The penalty appeared in the restricted arm too, where students could use tablets only if they stayed flat on the desk 5.

Ravizza, Uitvlugt and Fenn measured the browsing rather than asking about it. Students in an introductory psychology course logged into a proxy server that recorded time, frequency and history during class. Non-academic internet use was common and ran inverse to exam performance, and the relationship held after accounting for motivation, interest and intelligence. Class-related browsing carried no benefit 6.

So 0.18 standard deviations for the open laptop against g = 0.248 for handwriting plus review. Both are worth a couple of points, which makes the browser tab as big a decision as the pen.

The protocol.

  1. Book the review before the session starts. 15 minutes, inside 24 hours, in the calendar. The 2024 effect was measured on notes that were taken and then reviewed, and the 2019 extension found note takers matching a no-notes group on an immediate test 24.
  2. Ban copied clauses. One line per idea, in your own words, no phrase lifted from the speaker. Verbatim overlap was the variable that tracked lower conceptual scores in the original experiments 1.
  3. Spend typing speed on your own content. If you type, put the extra volume into questions, counterexamples and what you will try on Monday, rather than into a transcript. Typing beats handwriting on word count by g = 0.919, so the capacity is there 4.
  4. Write three open questions before you leave the room. Mark them in the margin. At the review, answer them cold, then check your notes and correct what you got wrong.
  5. Close everything that is not the notes file. Browser shut, phone out of reach, wifi off when the session does not need it 56.

If you will do the review, handwrite: that is the condition the 0.248 was measured under. If you know you will skip it, the medium stops mattering and the 15 minutes in the calendar is the repair. Either way, book the slot and write the three questions before you leave the room.

Sources.

  1. Mueller, P. A., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking. Psychological Science, 25(6), 1159-1168. doi:10.1177/0956797614524581
  2. Morehead, K., Dunlosky, J., & Rawson, K. A. (2019). How Much Mightier Is the Pen than the Keyboard for Note-Taking? A Replication and Extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014). Educational Psychology Review, 31, 753-780. doi:10.1007/s10648-019-09468-2
  3. Urry, H. L., Crittle, C. S., Floerke, V. A., et al. (2021). Don't Ditch the Laptop Just Yet: A Direct Replication of Mueller and Oppenheimer's (2014) Study 1 Plus Mini Meta-Analyses Across Similar Studies. Psychological Science, 32(3), 326-339. doi:10.1177/0956797620965541
  4. Flanigan, A. E., Wheeler, J., Colliot, T., Lu, J., & Kiewra, K. A. (2024). Typed Versus Handwritten Lecture Notes and College Student Achievement: A Meta-Analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 36, 78. doi:10.1007/s10648-024-09914-w
  5. Carter, S. P., Greenberg, K., & Walker, M. S. (2017). The impact of computer usage on academic performance: Evidence from a randomized trial at the United States Military Academy. Economics of Education Review, 56, 118-132. doi:10.1016/j.econedurev.2016.12.005
  6. Ravizza, S. M., Uitvlugt, M. G., & Fenn, K. M. (2017). Logged In and Zoned Out: How Laptop Internet Use Relates to Classroom Learning. Psychological Science, 28(2), 171-180. doi:10.1177/0956797616677314

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