Why you should take notes by hand — not on a laptop

Vox writes Why you should take notes by hand — not on a laptop "Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer, the psychologists who conducted the new research, believe it's because students on laptops usually just mindlessly type everything a professor says. Those taking notes by hand, though, have to actively listen and decide what's important — because they generally can't write fast enough to get everything down — which ultimately helps them learn."

"Both of these studies, though, eliminated a key benefit of laptop note-taking: the ability to look over a much more complete set of notes while studying. So as a final test, the researchers had students watch a seven-minute lecture (taking notes either on a laptop or by hand), let a week pass, then gave some of the students ten minutes to study their notes before taking a test. Having time to study mattered — but only for students who'd taken notes by hand. These students did significantly better on both conceptual and factual questions. But studying didn't help laptop users at all, and even made them perform slightly worse on the test."

I've seen a few similar things in the last year but have been to lazy to check if it's all coming from the same study or if the results have been reproduced. I do generally feel like hand writing notes is more effective but also more frustrating. It's slower and harder to get down everything you might want; unless there are graphs or drawings, they're way easier to do via a pen than on a computer. Though it is a lot nicer to have typed notes to search through rather than paper.

If the theory is that it's too easy to type notes on laptop and it needs to be harder to help you learn, I wonder what studies of using an iPad would show. Typing on an iPad is no where near as easy as on a laptop. And if it's the difficulty that is the point, then using handwriting apps on an iPad would be even better than handwriting on paper.

Oh and I've seen a few responses similar to Ezra Klein's, "Yes, but what if you literally can't read the notes you take by hand?" My answer is go back to second grade and learn how to write.