The authors, from Princeton University and UCLA, performed three studies on college students. They found that even if multitasking and distractions were eliminated, “students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand.”
Previous research has shown that note taking enhances learning by both providing external storage of information for later review and “encoding,” that is, processing information and reframing it in one’s own words.
Although significantly more notes were taken by laptop users, they tended to be more like transcriptionists instead of thinking about and summarizing what they heard.
