Taking notes by hand or on a laptop: what the repeat studies found

The short answer: choose the one you will review

Most of us have heard that typing notes is bad for learning. The table above shows how that claim looks now. One study started it. A direct repeat did not find it. The pooled reviews land somewhere between "small edge for paper" and "little difference."

So the choice of pen or keyboard is a small one. Two other choices are bigger. Do you go back to your notes at all? And is the laptop open to anything else while you take them?

How one 2014 study became a rule

In 2014, Mueller and Oppenheimer ran three lab studies. Students watched lectures and took notes on laptops or by hand. The authors reported that "students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions."

Their reason was simple. Typists tend to copy a lecture word for word, and copying gets in the way of putting ideas into your own words. The story was tidy, and it spread quickly.

Then other teams tried to repeat it. In 2021, Urry and colleagues ran a direct repeat of the first study. They had 74 laptop users and 68 who wrote by hand. Laptop users did type more words and more word-for-word notes, just as the first study said. But on the quiz, the laptop group did no worse. A second team, Morehead, Dunlosky and Rawson, also could not reproduce the original pattern in 2019, according to a summary on the Learning Scientists blog.

The pooled reviews do not fully agree with each other. Flanigan and colleagues' 2024 meta-analysis of 24 studies found a small edge for "taking and reviewing handwritten notes." A 2022 dissertation by Lau put that edge in plain numbers: where typists averaged about 50 percent on a quiz, handwriters would average about 57. Lau also found some sign that letting people review their notes shrank the gap.

Review matters more than the pen

Researchers split the value of notes into two parts. One is writing them. The other is what you do with them later.

In 1985, Kiewra reviewed the research on notes. Taking notes helps on its own, he found, and reviewing them "is additionally beneficial." Flanigan's team put it more bluntly in their summary of older work: the main benefit of lecture notes "emerges from the review of notes."

That is a problem, because review is the step most people skip. Online courses make it easy to skip the notes too. A 2019 survey of 577 college students by Morehead and colleagues found that students often chose not to take notes in online courses at all.

The laptop risk that does hold up is the other tabs. In a simulated classroom, Sana and colleagues (2013) found that students who multitasked on a laptop during a lecture scored lower on a test. So did students who could see a classmate's screen. If you type, close everything the lecture does not need.

Two ways to make notes pay off

The chapter Notes That Help Later in Stop Rereading gives two tools. Both work on paper or on a screen.

Close the Book, Then Write carries a SOLID badge. As soon as a lecture or video ends, close everything. Write what you remember for 5 to 10 minutes. When you stall, wait a full minute, since the last few items often show up late. Then open the notes and add what you missed in a second color. The second-color items are your study list. The badge comes from work like Karpicke and Blunt (2011), where recall practice beat building concept maps, even on questions that needed inferences.

The Cover-and-Quiz Page carries a STORY ONLY badge, and the book says why. Draw a line a third of the way across the page and take notes on the right. Within a day, write a question on the left for each chunk. To review, cover the right side and answer out loud. No careful study has tested this layout itself. It borrows from strong evidence that quizzing beats rereading, but the page as a whole is untested.

We like that the chapter does not ask you to switch tools. It asks you to use the notes you already take, later, in a way that makes you pull the ideas back out. If the laptop is open during study, our page on whether a phone nearby hurts studying covers the other half of that problem.