Students retain information better with pens than laptops by Laura Sanders.
From the post:
When it comes to taking notes, the old-fashioned way might be best. Students who jotted down notes by hand remembered lecture material better than their laptop-wielding peers did, researchers report April 23 in Psychological Science.
People taking notes on laptops have a shallower grasp of a subject than people writing with their hands, and not just because laptops distract users with other activities such as web surfing, the new study suggests.
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The study in question: P.A. Mueller and D.M. Oppenheimer. The pen is mightier than the keyboard: advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological Science. Published online April 23, 2014. doi: 10.1177/0956797614524581.
Laura lists some resources for further reading.
What do you think this study means for the design of UIs?
I ask because some topic map UIs will be for information retrieval, where conceptual understanding isn’t at issue and others will be for imparting conceptual understandings.
What would you do differently in UI terms for those cases and just as importantly, why?
I first saw this in a tweet by Carl Anderson.