In lectures… *write* notes

Thursday, 15 May, 2014

Came across this nice piece over at The Atlantic on taking lecture notes…. the short takeaway is that writing lecture notes helps you remember them more easily. However lets dig in to the report a little further….

They conducted a trial: (1) Watch lecture and take notes, (2) Complete irrelevant mental tasks for 30 minutes and (3) Take a quiz on the material. Step (2) is important to allow the “forgetting curve” to kick in (see here). The key finding, as reported, is this:

“In this group, longhand-notetakers outperformed laptop-notetakers on the quiz. Analysis of student notes showed that laptop-notetakers tended to transcribe a lot of the speaker’s words verbatim. Mueller and Oppenheimer suspected that this was because those who typed notes were inclined to transcribe lectures, rather than process them. This makes sense: If you can type quickly enough, word-for-word transcription is possible, whereas writing by hand usually rules out capturing every word.”

Being able to type quickly means that you become mentally lazy - the key point which was NOT drawn out is this…. deep learning takes place when you assimilate new ideas, classify them, interpret them, interject them with your own thoughts, rework them in to your mindset and then see where you started. Surficial learning occurs when you simply try to “record” what is being said - this could be by recording the audio and then just listening, or it could be writing it all down, verbatim, word-for-word. This is knowledge, not learning. If all you want to do is this, buy a book, read it. Don’t waste your time going to a lecture!! If however you really do want to learn, treat the lecture as an interactive medium - the lecturer shouldn’t be there to simply read out a set of notes to you, but rather introduce you to new ideas, concepts or techniques, get you to practice them, think about them, assimilate them…. reframe what you hear within your own understanding or context, ask questions in order for it to make sense, be classified, within your mindset. In the genuine sense of the word, your are turning your ignorance in to learning, but it is only with that active participation that this can happen.

So it’s not about laptops or writing, but rather our approaches to learning…unfortunately it appears many students can’t make that distinction, even when they are told about it.

Add comment

Fill out the form below to add your own comments