(Not So) Hot Takes | Digital note taking has taken over, and it’s time we go back to good old fashioned pen and paper.
A majority of students take lecture notes digitally. / Photo Credit: Matej Kastelic / Shutterstock
By Emma McClure
I’m in five reading heavy classes this semester—and I’ve seen about the same number of people taking physical notes on paper. Call me old school, but I miss when people took notes with a pen and paper. I’ve only been in three classes that banned laptops (two of which were language classes), and only one of them really stuck by the policy for the entire semester. Take me back to the good old days.
This generation didn’t grow up using laptops for every assignment, but we sure did embrace their use. It’s unsurprising that technology in classrooms spiked during the pandemic. I once assumed, perhaps naively, that we would soon return to pre-Covid technology use. Gone, however, are the days of students pulling out binders or notebooks as they sit at their desks. Now, the professor says something important and I can hardly hear the second half of the sentence over the furious typing of the hundred students on their computers around me. A study of graduate students at UNC Chapel Hill found that 63% of students take notes digitally in their classes. Based on my observations, I’d say that it’s a much higher percentage in my classes.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand some of the perks. I’m sure it’s nice to inconspicuously text your friends or window shop on Amazon while the professor thinks you’re paying attention. I also see a lot of students knocking out homework for other classes in lectures. However, these perks aren’t very beneficial, since you’re distracting yourself and the people around you. Plus, isn’t it embarrassing when you forget to turn your volume down and blast a TikTok or the celebratory music for completing the NYT mini crossword in class?
Besides making it impossible to hear the professor, is all that furious typing really doing anything? The Harvard Graduate School of Education found that “when college students use computers or tablets during lectures, they learn less and earn worse grades.” Although typing notes allows students to store more information, it seems that this information is not being well encoded, as students demonstrate a poorer understanding of the information when taking digital notes. It doesn’t seem like all that typing is really too helpful.
Furthermore, digital note taking can embrace other forms of laziness. For example, many students use talk-to-text features to transcribe the lecture word for word. I find it hard to believe that these students are really going back through the transcripts of every hour-and-a-half lecture and doing much with that information. What is the value in this transcription? The whole point of taking notes is to keep you actively engaged in the material and help you encode information better. You can’t do that when your computer is taking the notes for you. Plus, verbatim note taking is among the least useful forms of notes. Paraphrasing forces you to think more about the content while you’re learning it, helping you form connections to other information, improving memory and understanding.
Having your laptop out in class also seeds the temptation to do other things instead of taking notes. When you’re sitting in a boring lecture and your laptop is already right there, it’s all too easy to switch to that pesky problem set or start messaging a friend instead of taking notes. Unsurprisingly, being distracted in class instead of taking notes results in lower grades. Moreover, working on other things on your laptop negatively affects the students around you, earning them 17% lower scores on tests than their peers who weren’t seated next to someone doing off-task work on their computer.
Taking notes by hand will give you the most bang for your buck. Writing by hand activates regions of your brain that help improve your memory, and studies have even shown that writing on paper is more beneficial than taking written notes on an iPad. Engaging the fine motor functions used in writing produces stronger memory than typing does. Writing by hand is also slower and requires more paraphrasal, forcing you to engage with the content and improving overall understanding.
As you go forth to tackle the next round of midterms, consider putting the laptop away and opting for a pen and some paper instead. It might just do your grades some good (and make your old-fashioned friend here at the Penn Post very happy).
Emma McClure is a sophomore in the College studying Criminology and minoring in Legal Studies and History from Columbus, GA. Emma is also The Social Ivy editor at The Pennsylvania Post. Her email is efmcc@sas.upenn.edu.
