According to The Wall Street Journal research shows that students who take notes by hand outperform those who use laptops!
Interesting there was very little difference in short time memorization between those who took notes by hand and those who used a laptop.
After 24 hours both groups (laptop note takers and handwriting note takers) were allowed to review their notes and the handwriting notetakers outperformed laptop users by a significant margin.
See the 5 minutes feature here. Link to the actual research here.
Please note that in the experiment laptop users were not connected to the internet, i.e. they were not distracted by socialmedia and digital messages. To decide if you will go for handnotes or laptop notes, please make sure to factor in the effect of these distractions!
Top that up with research from McMaster University in Canada suggest that laptop users learn between 11% and 17% less due to internet / social media / message distractions alone!
I suggest you take a minute to reflect 🙂
BTW, when the researchers refer to ‘longhand notetaking’ they are simply taking about ‘ordinary notetaking’, as opposed to stenography and similar.
[UPDATE SEP. 2017] New research from Norway says exactly the same! Read more (in Danish): at ing.dk