Back in the olden days, when kids actually came to school, kids who would miss a class would ask me if they could take pictures of my lecture notes. I would always tell them no, but they could copy them by hand. The signal has to go through your brain on its way from your eyes to your fingers, and you remember stuff more. I can carry on a conversation and type at the same time, and the typing bypasses the brain and just happens, but you can't do that when you're writing. Maybe it's the motor skills necessary to write, maybe it just takes more time to write and the time factor is the difference, but you get the most bang for your buck by taking notes by hand:
Whether or not you’re picky, know that tools for the hands are tools for the brain. Handwritten notes are a powerful tool for encrypting embodied cognition and in turn supporting the brain’s capacity for retrieval of information. And secondly, when you take notes by hand, your hands create a robust external memory storage: your notebook.
Taking notes by hand is a win-win, and belongs in every student’s cognitive tool kit. Learning how to take notes by hand effectively, and how to ingrain note-taking as a key learning and study tool, can begin as early as grades 3 or 4, but it’s never too late to begin.
We live in a digital age where daily functioning involves digital communication. Automaticity in keyboarding is an important skill too, and the tools and applications for digital communication will continue to evolve and have their place. But keyboarding does not provide the tactile feedback to the brain that contact between pencil or pen and paper does — the key to creating the neurocircuitry in the hand-brain complex.
I knew I was right, I just didn't have the neuroscience to back me up--until now. Go read the whole thing.
Going to k-12 in the 50-60s makes me a dinosaur but my poor, small-town school did many things right. We had a very strong 1-8 foundation, starting with the Normal School grads teaching 1-4; phonics, grammar, spelling, composition, math, science, government, geography, and history (including art, architecture and music; taught by our regular classroom teachers) and that continued in 5-8. Our 5th-grade teacher taught us the standard outline format and we had lots of practice with it; first from books then from lecture. By HS entry, those of us in the college-prep and secretarial programs, especially, were adept at taking good lecture notes. That was a lifesaver in college, when no professor gave notes or study sheets and no recording was permitted and no xerox machines in the library.
ReplyDeleteMy senior year of high school I wanted an "easy" class, so I took shorthand. Shorthand is *great* for taking notes if you're going to transcribe them later.
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