Stylus in hand, senior Vit Do leans over her iPad, swiftly navigating through her taskbar and array of Biology diagrams.With a practiced ease, she makes colorful annotations on each nucleotide, enjoying the benefits of both digital tools and handwritten notes. For Do, this method has become second nature, having grown up alongside piles of stationery and bullet journals.Later at home, Do moves from learning to reviewing her material, shifting her notes onto her computer.
Do said she alternates her method of note-taking depending on whether she is learning or reviewing content.
“If I am learning the information for the first time, I write it down instead of typing it,” Do said. “However, if I’m reviewing a concept, I just type out concepts to remember them.”
Senior Divya Gandhi, who also prefers taking notes on her iPad, said she has noticed an increased use of tablets for note-taking among other students.
“I remember in freshman year, everybody would use notebooks and binders,” Gandhi said. “But now in senior year, I see the majority of people in some classes using iPads. Maybe one of the reasons is that as we’re getting closer to university, taking notes on iPads is probably the most common type of note-taking at university, so people want to just start doing that early so they get in the habit.”
With increasing iPad use, Gandhi, who uses the app GoodNotes, encourages students to search for a note-taking app that is best suited for their use case to maximize benefits.
“Make sure you know how to use everything because in a lot of these apps, there are a bunch of useful tools that aren’t obvious to people,” Gandhi said. “On an app that I use, there is a button that records audio. So if your teacher talks really fast, you can just hit record and listen to it later and slow it down to take notes.”
Based on his research, Carnegie Mellon University Professor of Psychology Danny Oppenheimer said handwriting notes, either on the iPad or on paper, reduces the tendency to take notes verbatim.
“Taking notes in one’s own words has long been known to be beneficial for learning, and we found that people who took notes in their own words learned more,” Oppenheimer said.“Handwriting as a medium tends to encourage deeper processing of the material and thus can facilitate performance. So the best advice is to take notes in your own words.”
Oppenheimer’s research holds true for many students. Sophomore Ishaan Juyal said he sees the benefits of handwriting notes and uses a notebook for his typical class.
“It helps me with memorization because it forces you to actually comprehend what you’re looking at and take it down,” Juyal said.
However, when learning lots of information, such as for Science Olympiad competitions, Juyal said he prefers typed notes.
“Even though it’s probably better for memorization if I handwrite, there’s too much information,” Juyal said. “(Handwritten notes) are a lot more time-consuming whereas with digital typing, it’s a generally faster process. I also have to make note cards for tournaments, so it’s a lot more convenient to do it digitally.”
Since there is a variation in notetaking needs, Oppenheimer said note-taking is a case-to-case situation.
“If your goal is to have as complete a record of what was said as possible, then you should type notes as you’ll be able to type more quickly and take down more of the lecture,” Oppenheimer said. “If your goal is to take effective notes on things that don’t lend themselves to typing, you should handwrite.”
Regardless of others’ preferences, Do said she prefers using an iPad for note-taking because it allows for more flexibility compared to notebooks.
“With iPads, when I want to rewrite a little detail, I can adjust it, move it or erase it without affecting the visual spread,” Do said. “When I had to carry a backpack around with (paper) notes and binders, I felt a lot of it on my back. On an iPad, you can’t run out of paper, so I can have 50 page notebooks if I need.”
Do also said using free iPad PDFs is more accessible.
“For AP Lit, I have to read a lot, and I personally prefer downloading the PDF that my teacher provides and then annotating it there,” Do said. “I don’t have to spend $20 on buying a book just so I can annotate it,”
Looking forward, Oppenheimer said he expects the evolution of note-taking to follow the development of AI.
“It’s possible that students will soon have the ability to capture verbatim records of class without taking notes at all,” Oppenheimer said. “Hopefully that will push students toward the sorts of reasoning and note-taking that is most effective — thinking deeply about material and jotting down their thoughts. Of course, it’s also possible that auto-transcription devices will allow some students to tune out entirely, letting devices take notes for them while they daydream.”
