Why You Should Stop Bringing Your Laptop to Class

With all the apps and digital tools available to enhance your learning, and how fast and easy it is to type notes, it seems like it’s a no-brainer to bring your laptop to class. But it can actually be a no-brainer in the literal sense: there is good reason to believe that taking notes by hand and leaving your computer closed helps your brain remember more, so you perform better overall. That’s why you should try leaving your laptop at home.

Digital notes aren’t perfect

There have been many studies that show that handwritten notes are better than those you take on a computer, even though typing is much faster and you can get more information on the page. In fact, that’s part of the problem: when you’re taking notes by hand, you have to be picky about what’s important enough to write. You must use critical thinking, sketching, and listening carefully to determine which parts of the lecture are valuable enough to take the time to write them down. As you type, you can simply transcribe the entire lecture in real time if you wish, and you can do it on auto-pilot without involving your brain deeply in the material.

A recent study supporting long note taking as a reigning champion was published in Teaching of Psychology in 2022. The researchers divided the participants into four categories: those who took notes by hand and took the test on the computer, those who took notes on the computer. computer and took the test by hand, those who took notes and did the test on the computer, and those who did it all by hand. Overall, regardless of how they ended up on the test, students who took notes by hand did better on the quiz overall and better answered concept questions.

Your computer is distracting

It’s handy to be able to search for concepts, take notes, and save tabs of extras throughout a lesson, but it’s just as handy to switch to a new window and scroll through social media or send work emails. Distraction in the classroom is not conducive to memory and productivity, regardless of whether the tool at hand could help you if you were to use it.

A 2012 survey , published in the Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, found that of 478 students and 36 faculty surveyed at one university, nearly half felt non-educational use of technology in the classroom was distracting. There have been many other studies showing that using phones or laptops for non-educational purposes during class has a negative impact on academic performance. Journal articles about these results have fairly simple headlines such as ” Class Attention Reduces Exam Performance ” and make it clear that doing anything other than taking notes or following class materials on a computer only affects your ability to learn and save valuable information. information.

And since taking notes on a computer is not so great, you can not take a device with you at all.