Some time ago I began this series on why I do not let my students use technology in the classroom. My wife, Cindy, alerted me today to yet more evidence regarding the efficacy of hand-written notes versus digital. These findings also included the efficacy of reading documents on a computer screen versus reading from a paper-based handout. All of it confirms my opinion that good’old American paper is far better for educating my students.
Digital or Print: Which Is Better for Comprehension and Note-Taking?
In this article in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, authors Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey (San Diego State University and Health Sciences High and Middle College) summarize three studies comparing digital and hard-copy reading and note-taking.
- Singer and Alexander (2017) – This review of 36 empirical studies compared reading comprehension among both middle-school and college students. One finding was that when the length of a reading passage didn’t require scrolling on a digital device, students’ reading comprehension was the same. With longer passages, students who read paper texts did better. The study also found that students reading print material did better on questions that asked for more-detailed and nuanced information.
- Mangen, Walgermo, and Bronnick (2013) – The researchers had Norwegian tenth graders read online or hard-copy narratives and informational passages of about 1,500 words and found that students who read in hard copy did better on comprehension. The researchers had two theories. First, they speculated that hard-copy texts provide readers with “unequivocal and fixed spatial cues for text memory and recall… [T]he absence of touch and physical handling of the pages of the digital form of the articles may have ‘disrupted the mental maps of the text…’” The authors speculated that students reading online articles were overconfident in predicting their performance, compared to those who read hard copies. Paper texts seemed to involve “more effortful learning” in contrast to the “fast and shallow reading” of digital material.
- Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014) – This study compared laptop to hand-written notetaking in college classes. The researchers found that laptop note-takers got more words down, often verbatim phrases and sentences from the content. By contrast, longhand note-takers wrote fewer words but did more paraphrasing, capturing material at a more conceptual level. Tested 30 minutes afterward, both groups did comparably on factual items, but the longhand note-takers did significantly better on conceptual questions. In a second study with different participants, laptop note-takers were urged to take conceptual versus transcription-type notes, but this made no difference to the kind of notes they took, and they still did less well on conceptual questions than longhand note-takers.
- Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014) also conducted a third experiment (with different participants), this time testing students on factual and conceptual content a week later on the material they’d heard and taken notes on. They divided students into four groups:
- Laptop note-takers not allowed to study their notes before the test;
- Laptop note-takers allowed to look at their notes;
- Longhand note-takers not allowed to study their notes;
- Longhand note-takers allowed to study their notes.
- The first three groups all performed poorly on the test. Only the group that took longhand notes and then studied them did well. “Longhand notes,” conclude Fisher and Frey, “appear to require the learner to process the information, making decisions about what information is most important, synthesizing, and putting concepts into their own words. All of these are critical thinking skills that are indicators of learning.”
Reference
“Reading and Writing on Screen and Paper” by Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey in Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, November/December 2018 (Vol. 62, #3, p. 349-351), https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/jaal.901
The authors can be reached at dfisher@mail.sdsu.edu and nfrey@sdsu.edu.
