Comment on Here’s What Happened When I Made My College Students Put Away Their Phones
hisao@ani.social 2 days agoWhat we did in school and uni never required processing and summarizing anything. Teacher/lecturer would simply dictate and we had to write down anything that what explicitly preceded by “write this down”. I’d agree processing and summarizing helps with learning, but that’s totally irrelevant and doesn’t have anything to do with writing,
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Really? That sounds like way too much hand-holding for a college course. I certainly had times when the teacher told us things that would definitely be on the test, but they didn’t do that for anywhere near the majority of the test content, only when rattling off a bunch of trivia and noting which of that was actually necessary to remember (i.e. remember start and end dates of WW2, but not the date of every battle).
Tests should be more about concepts rather than trivia, so “write this down” shouldn’t be a very common thing.
But it’s not. Studies have shown that handwritten notes improve absorption of material. You can obviously get the same results by improving other study methods (i.e. reviewing and editing digital notes later), but if we’re strictly talking about note-taking itself (i.e. if you discard the notes afterward), handwritten notes are superior. So if you’re in a situation where you have audio (or better yet, transcribed) lectures, handwritten notes can improve your mastery of the content. You’ll get much more value from recording lectures and hand-writing notes during class than typing notes into a computer.
hisao@ani.social 1 day ago
So studies have shown that something is true that was never true for me in practice. Well, maybe I did something wrong. Those who never tried taking handwritten notes in their lives should definitely try, maybe it works for them. Or maybe they will simply enjoy it. Doesn’t hurt to try.