Here Is a Secret to Better Student Recall Information

Here's a Secret to Better Student Recall "

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Careers! LAST SPRING, a study showed that students who took notes in longhand did substantially better on conceptual questions than those who took notes on a laptop. The results were not very surprising--until you consider that the laptops' Internet access had been disabled.! It wasn't that the laptop note-takers were more distracted. That may indeed be a valid concern with personal technology in the classroom, but it was not what Pam Mueller, of Princeton University, and Daniel Oppenheimer, of the University of California at Los Angeles, had set out to measure. Rather, their report suggests that there are real differences between the utility of taking notes by hand and on a computer.! When students take notes on a laptop, the report concluded, the ease of data entry makes them more likely to transcribe everything the professor is saying. Students who take notes in longhand, in contrast, cannot write fast enough to get everything down and so must be selective.! It is precisely that process--of summarizing, thinking about what's most important, and predicting what might be useful--that helps those who take notes on paper. Students who use laptops end up with neater, more easily searchable notes, but they may be denying themselves the opportunity to do the upfront processing that is a crucial factor, it seems, in long-term retention of class material.! The study's results illustrate an example of what the UCLA cognitive psychologist Robert Bjork has termed "desirable difficulties"--tasks that make students' brains work a little bit harder in the name of better long-term memory. Our brains don't function like audio recorders, saving everything we perceive. Instead, memories are cemented through frequent neural activity, and with repeated encoding and retrieval processes.! That's what underlies the so-called "testing effect," which I wrote about in February. When we give our students frequent tests on important...