Pen or keyboard? What the research says about taking notes

A claim that spread fast#

In 2014, two psychologists, Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer, published a study with a title that was hard to forget: "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard." In Psychological Science they reported that students who took notes by hand did better on conceptual questions about a lecture than students who typed.

The finding was easy to explain and easy to repeat. Typing is fast, so people type almost everything they hear, word for word, without thinking much. Handwriting is slow, so people have to listen, decide what matters and put it in their own words. That extra thinking, the argument went, helps learning.

News stories, school policies and thousands of conversations followed. Laptops were banned in some classrooms. It is worth looking at what has happened to the idea since.

What the original study did#

The experiments were small and short. Undergraduates watched a recorded talk and took notes, either on a laptop or by hand. Some were tested shortly afterwards on facts and on concepts. The researchers also counted how much of each person's notes was copied word for word from the talk, and found that typists copied more.

Two things made the result attractive. It matched a belief many people already held, that writing by hand is better for thinking. And it came with a neat mechanism, the idea that slower note-taking forces summarising.

What later research found#

Science asks for a result to be repeated by other people, and this one was repeated.

A replication and meta-analysis in 2019. Morehead, Dunlosky and Rawson repeated the study and combined it with related research, in Educational Psychology Review. Their results were similar: any advantage for longhand was small and not statistically significant.
A direct replication in 2021. A team led by Heather Urry repeated the first experiment with 145 undergraduates at Tufts University, compared with 67 Princeton students in the original. Typed and handwritten notes made no significant difference to factual recall, as in the original. Unlike the original, they also found no relationship between typing or writing and conceptual recall. They also combined their results with those of other related studies and concluded that the evidence does not support the idea that longhand note-taking improves immediate learning by changing how information is encoded.

That is not the same as showing that handwriting is worse, and it does not prove typing is better. It shows that the strong claim, that writing by hand clearly beats typing for learning, is not well supported.

What the research does support#

Several smaller points hold up better than the headline.

Copying word for word is a weak strategy. Whatever you use, transcribing a lecture almost verbatim tends to do less for understanding than putting the ideas in your own words.
Notes help most when you use them. Reviewing notes, and testing yourself from them, matters more than how the notes were written down.
The difference between people may matter more than the difference between tools. Some people take excellent notes on a laptop and others do on paper.
Distraction is a real cost of laptops. A device that offers messages and the web can pull attention away from the lecture. That is a separate issue from handwriting versus typing, though it is a good reason to switch notifications off.

A practical way to choose#

You do not need to settle the research question to take good notes. Use these points.

Pick the one you will actually use. A notebook you carry beats an app you never open, and the reverse is also true.
If you type, slow yourself down. Resist transcribing. Wait for the speaker to finish a thought, then write it in your own words.
If you write by hand, keep the notes readable and findable. Date every page, number the pages, and keep a short index.
Turn off notifications while you take notes, whichever tool you use.
Always review. Look at your notes the next day, then again after a week. Cover them and try to recall the main points.
Match the tool to the task. Quick sketches, diagrams and maths are often easier on paper. Searchable reference notes and long projects are often easier on a screen.

Why handwriting still has a place#

Even if the learning claim was overstated, many people enjoy writing by hand and find it calm. A notebook has no tabs, no feed and no battery. For thinking through a problem, planning a day or writing a first draft of an idea, that quiet is useful. It simply should not be sold as a proven learning hack.

What to take from this story#

The story of this one study is a useful lesson in how to read research.

A single study is a starting point. It is not a conclusion.
Small samples can mislead. Hundreds of people are better evidence than dozens.
Check whether it was replicated. A result that holds up when other teams repeat it is far more trustworthy.
A good story is not evidence. An appealing mechanism can make a weak result feel strong.

The best note-taking method is the one that gets you to listen carefully, put ideas in your own words and come back to them later. Both pens and keyboards can do that.

Sources#

Mueller, P. A., and Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand over Laptop Note Taking." Psychological Science, 25(6), 1159 to 1168.
Morehead, K., Dunlosky, J., and Rawson, K. A. (2019). "How Much Mightier Is the Pen than the Keyboard for Note-Taking? A Replication and Extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014)." Educational Psychology Review, 31, 753 to 780. Link
Urry, H. L., and colleagues (2021). A replication of the first experiment, reported in Psychological Science. The Association for Psychological Science summarised it in Don't Ditch the Laptop Just Yet.