Recently, National Public Radio (NPR) ran the story, Attention, Students: Put Your Laptops Away, which you can read or listen to here. The piece looks at research on college students' information retention when using a laptop, versus pen(cil) and paper when taking notes in class. The excerpt below highlights two hypotheses about the benefits of note-taking for learners.
...there are two hypotheses to why note-taking is beneficial in the first place. The first idea is called the encoding hypothesis, which says that when a person is taking notes, "the processing that occurs" will improve "learning and retention." The second, called the external-storage hypothesis, is that you learn by being able to look back at your notes, or even the notes of other people.
The piece goes on to provide the scenarios for research with college students, which finds a key point in the type of questions learners are asked after taking notes on a computer or paper. For questions that asked students to simply remember facts, like dates, both groups did equally well. But for "conceptual-application" questions, such as, "How do Japan and Sweden differ in their approaches to equality within their societies?" the laptop users did "significantly worse."
The conclusion drawn by these researchers is that it's unlikely that we are going to get many people to go back to paper-based note-taking, but technologies like Livescribe, and other stylus and tablet-based technologies, may be the future of note-taking.
Questions: How do most learners in your programs take notes? Do you notice a difference between those who take notes on paper, versus others who use some form of computer-based technology? What are your thoughts about note-taking, and the practice of teaching this as part of an adult education curriculum? Are learners with language-based disabilities at any advantage, or disadvantage, when it comes to note-taking? Have you seen technology help, or hinder, that process?
Mike Cruse
Disabilities in Adult Education Moderator
michaelcruse74@gmail.com