When “The Handwriting Advantage” Meets “Learning How to Learn”

We teachers have LOTS to learn from cognitive science:

how to help students review
how to foster motivation
how to reduce stress

No doubt, we want to pass many of these ideas on to our students. As they learn geometry and spelling and the atomic mass of carbon, they can also learn when to use retrieval practice.

One specific example: we have many reasons to think that note-taking supports long-term learning. What’s the best advice we can give our students on this subject?

Happily, we have an increasing pool of research that explores this topic. All this research gives us initial pointers. It also raises intriguing — underexplored — questions.

Let me explain.

The Research, Part I: All the Steps

The most comprehensive note-taking study I’ve found explored several major questions simultaneously. In this study, Dr. Abraham Flanigan and his team wanted to know:

Do students benefit from the chance to stop and revise their notes mid-lecture?
Are handwritten notes or laptop notes more helpful for learning?
Should students copy diagrams from lectures or not?
Should students’ notes include full ideas, or are partial ideas enough?

As you can imagine, answering four research questions in one study requires lots of methodological juggling, and LOTS of data crunching. Here’s the brief version.

Students in this study watched a 21-minute video on plate tectonics: strike-slip faults, subduction zones, and so forth.

At three points during the lecture, the tape paused.

Half of the students were instructed to revise their notes: “make your notes more complete and more meaningful…recall and record any lecture information you failed to note…add missing terms, details, and examples.”
As a control condition, the other half were instructed to copy their notes “word-for-word. You are not allowed to add, correct, or leave out any information.”

These groups were subdivided further. Half of the students in each group wrote their notes by hand. The other half took notes on laptops.

The participants returned two days later, studied their notes for fifteen minutes, and then took a quiz.

The Research, Part II: The Findings

As you can see, team Flanigan has many moving parts to keep track of. Rather than note all the findings and interactions, I’ll focus on those questions above.

First: yes, students who were instructed how to revise their notes remembered more two days later than those who merely copied their notes.

Second: students who wrote by hand remembered more than those who took notes on laptops. (Important details to follow.)

Third: surprisingly (to me), copying diagrams did not improve learning. (BTW: I’ve looked into other research on this topic, and so far other studies roughly align with this suggestion.)

To explore the fourth question about recording complete vs. partial ideas, Team Flanigan studied the notes in extraordinary detail. They categorized them carefully, determining if they expressed

complete ideas from the lecture, or
partial ideas, or
simple conceptual labels.

All this categorizing led to a specific finding.

Once other factors were taken into statistical account, only complete ideas predicted higher scores; partial ideas and simple labels did not.

More specifically: the more complete ideas students wrote, the higher their score on the quiz.

Teaching Students How to Learn, Cautiously

When we translate these findings into advice, we should probably proceed cautiously.

Let’s try a careful suggestion or two:

“Teachers: this study shows that students take better notes when we give them class time to revise their notes, and instructions how to do so. Consider building short breaks into your lesson plans for this kind of cognitive work.”

Another suggestion:

“Students: your notes will help you more if you write down both concepts and supporting details. Concepts by themselves aren’t enough.”

Another:

“Students: simply copying diagrams during class doesn’t seem to help learning. Consider focusing more energy on writing concepts and details.”

In other words: yes, we can help students “learn how to learn.” This kind of advice will help them take better notes…and thereby learn more.

Learning How to Learn, Part II

Before we focus on one final piece of advice, let’s focus on an easy-to-overlook detail in the Flanigan study. The plate tectonics video included 198 pieces of information. On average, students recorded 60 of them; that is, roughly 30%. Better said, they didn’t write down seventy percent of the ideas in the video.

In other words: these students took substantially incomplete notes.

This finding highlights a puzzle, and suggests a possible solution.

Both common sense and research tell us that typing allows students to write more words faster than handwriting. Why, then, didn’t typing lead to more complete notes?

Flanigan’s data show that handwriters revised differently. Specifically, during the 3-minute revision breaks,

handwriters added more complete ideas than laptop note takers, and
handwriters completed more incomplete ideas than laptop note takers.

Even if laptop note takers could write more words, they not writing the most useful ones down.

Let’s restate those claims with a modest refinement:

untrained handwriters added more complete ideas than untrained laptop note takers, and
untrained handwriters completed more incomplete ideas than untrained laptop note takers.

Here’s the underexplored solution I’d like to propose: teachers can provide that training. We can teach students to revise with a focus on creating complete ideas:

“As you revise your notes right now, be sure to arrive at complete ideas. You can add examples to the concepts you have simply named. Or you can write down new concepts that hadn’t made it into your notes – but be sure to include examples and specifics. Writing complete ideas with labels and examples will help you learn more.”

Hypothetically, keyboarders who have learned how to learn will end up with more complete ideas in their notes. And – again, hypothetically – those additional complete ideas should result in more learning.

In other words:

Students who haven’t been taught how to take notes learn more from handwritten notes, but
Students who learn how to take notes well – by completing ideas with specific examples and details – just might learn more by keyboarding.

The current research findings (handwriting > keyboarding) might flip (keyboarding > handwriting) if we teach our students well.

Surprising Agreement

In offering this last suggestion, I’m contradicting popular belief. Almost all of my colleagues argue that handwritten notes are better; many cite a meta-analysis that Flanigan recently published.

For this reason, you might be surprised to learn that Dr. Flanigan agrees that my hypothesis merits investigation. When he and I discussed his study a few weeks ago, we ended up agreeing that:

Most research currently shows a handwriting advantage
If we teach our students well, they can get better at taking notes
Because people can type faster than they write, laptop note takers should be able to do more of the good things than handwriters.
- If “writing more complete ideas” turns out to be the magic ingredient, then keyboarders should be able to do more of that – although they currently don’t, because we haven’t taught them to do so.
- If, as Mueller and Oppenheimer suggested in 2014, “rewording the teacher’s statements rather than copying them verbatim” is the magic ingredient, keyboarders should be able to do more of that too.

If we teach students how to take notes, laptop note-takers might well use all those extra words they can write to take more helpful notes than handwriters.

Dr. Flanagan also highlighted important factors often overlooked when people make strong research-based claims.

The material being learned almost certainly matters. It’s difficult to type mathematical formulas – so in math heavy classes, handwriting might be more effective
We shouldn’t think of students as identical. Some students struggle to write by hand; others love the feel of nib on paper. Those differences might shape the advice we give.

To be clear, I don’t know that my hypothesis is correct: no one has tested it. But it strikes me as entirely plausible. For this reason, I’ve long resisted the certain claim that “handwriting is better that keyboarding.” If students who “learn how to learn” – in this case, learn how to take laptop notes as described – ultimately remember less than handwriters, then we can give students such advice. Until then, I think we should remain more curious than confident.

Flanigan, A. E., Kiewra, K. A., Lu, J., & Dzhuraev, D. (2023). Computer versus longhand note taking: Influence of revision. Instructional Science, 51(2), 251-284.

Flanigan, A. E., Wheeler, J., Colliot, T., Lu, J., & Kiewra, K. A. (2024). Typed versus handwritten lecture notes and college student achievement: A meta-analysis. Educational psychology review, 36(3), 78.