Evidence mounts that laptops are terrible for students at lectures

Time to reconsider the notebook and pen

Do you use a laptop or tablet to take notes during school lectures or meetings? If so then maybe you should reconsider pen and paper because there’s increasing evidence that using laptops during lectures decreases learning which can result in lower grades, reports The New York Times.

A study at Princeton University and the University of California, investigated this by asking some students to take notes at a lecture using pen and paper, while another group used laptops. The experiment found that the students who used a laptop did not understand the lecture as well as those who wrote their notes out by hand. The researchers hypothesized that this was because students who wrote notes by hand had to process what the lecturer was saying and in effect summarize what was being said to keep up with the lecture. The researchers noted that “laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.”