verbatim phrases In a note sent in response to fact-checking questions, the first author of this study, Pam Mueller of Princeton, wrote: “Only because a lot of people (on the Internet) seem to assume that we didn’t randomly assign participants to groups, and therefore the conclusions are invalid, it might be worth mentioning that the two groups were, in fact, randomly assigned. We did ask students about their underlying note-taking preference, but due to small numbers of participants in certain conditions (e.g., longhand-preferring students at Princeton assigned to the laptop condition) we can’t draw strong conclusions about any interactions there. There is some suggestion that those who preferred longhand in their regular note taking were more effective than others when using a laptop (i.e., continuing to take shorter, non-verbatim notes). One thing to note is that a strong majority of students at Princeton reported that they generally took notes on a laptop, while a majority of UCLA students reported that they took notes longhand. It is heartening that our second study (run at UCLA) did replicate our first study (run at Princeton).”
the lecture’s content In a note sent in response to fact-checking questions, Mueller wrote: “Laptop note-takers had far more content in their notes. Thus, we thought that the laptop note-takers’ performance would rebound when they had a chance to look back on their notes—the laptop note takers just had so much more information available at the time of study. However (as we were quite surprised to find), it seems that if they didn’t process the information at the time of encoding (i.e., during the lecture), the increased quantity of notes didn’t help, or at least didn’t help within a short study period. Perhaps with a longer time to study, they could piece together the content of the lecture, but at that point, the process is pretty inefficient, and it would be better to have taken ‘better’ (i.e., longhand-style, with less verbatim overlap) notes the first time around.”