Is it better to take notes by hand, or is it better to type in what you have heard, because the information is processed digitally anyway? The question, which at first glance seems harmless, has led to passionate scientific disputes, because opponents of digitization in schools like to use arguments from “Embodied Intelligence”.

This school of cognitive research emphasizes that consciousness is shaped by the physical interaction of the body with the environment. More specifically: the hippocampus, in which automated movements are stored, is derived from the spatial orientation system of the early vertebrates. Information that is written on paper can literally be “grasped” more easily, in contrast to information that appears on a screen.

What is better to remember? ? The thesis is indeed controversial. The dispute seemed decided when Pam Mueller, psychologist at Princeton University, together with Daniel Oppenheimer, today at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), 2014 presented a study that should prove this with numbers. First 65 college students got to see video lectures. They took notes either on laptops or with pen and notepad and had to answer questions about the content of the presentations half an hour later. For factual knowledge, both groups were the same, but for conceptual knowledge, the handwritten group was ahead.

Now the discussion should flare up again. Because researchers have tried to replicate the study of 2014 – but they did not succeed. In a similar test setup, Heather Urry and Chelsea Crittle from Tufts University and their team were able to confirm that students made more detailed notes on their laptops and included more verbatim speech in their notes. However, it does not do better in subsequent tests.

“If original and replication studies find different results, there are three interpretations: 1) there was a problem with replication; 2) there was a problem with the original study; and 3) the phenomenon under study is not permanent or universal, “write the authors. “These interpretations are not mutually exclusive”. As a serious weakness of the original study, they criticize, for example, that the test subjects were allowed to choose the medium pen or computer that suits them best. A cross-check independent of the preferences was just as little carried out as a comparison with test persons who had not made any notes. They also criticized the fact that the test participants did not have time to prepare for the test based on their notes – which would normally happen.

No refutation, a “generalization” Your conclusion therefore: “Until future research can clarify whether and when the right medium for note-taking affects academic performance, we conclude that students and professors who are concerned about the adverse effects of computer notes don’t have to throw away the laptop just yet. There is more work to be done with methods that better take into account the actual educational context. ”

Daniel Oppenheimer sees Urry’s study, however, less as a refutation of his results than as a “generalization”. “In our original studies, we brought the participants into a controlled laboratory environment that was calm and free of distraction,” he writes on request from heise online. However, there were many more distractions and disturbances in Urry’s studies. “Given that the key psychological mechanism that we believed to take advantage of handwritten notes is deeper thinking, testing people in highly distracting environments isn’t exactly fair.”

Nonetheless, Urry’s study is “important work”, because even in the real world, “students normally do not learn in strictly controlled laboratory environments,” writes Oppenheimer. “Classrooms are full of distractions and noise, and so Urry’s study can tell us whether the original results can be generalized to more natural situations.” Despite these objections, he wanted to re-examine the reliability of his original study “under controlled laboratory conditions,” he writes. “The only way to know the truth is to test it!” (wst)