Handwriting vs typing notes: what the research actually says

The study everyone quotes

In 2014, Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer published "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard" in Psychological Science. Students watched recorded talks while taking notes by hand or on a laptop, then took a quiz. The laptop group took longer, more word-for-word notes, and in the first study did worse on conceptual questions. The authors suggested that writing by hand forces you to summarise, and summarising helps understanding.

The paper was widely covered, and many lecturers banned laptops in class on the strength of it.

What happened when others repeated it

In 2021, Heather Urry and colleagues at Tufts University published a direct replication of the first study in the same journal. With 142 participants, the laptop group again took more words and more verbatim notes, but quiz performance did not differ significantly between the two groups, for factual or conceptual questions (Association for Psychological Science).

The same paper pooled eight similar studies in a small meta-analysis and again did not find a reliable advantage for longhand. The authors concluded that the results "do not support the idea that longhand note taking improves immediate learning via better encoding of information." An earlier replication by Morehead and colleagues (2019) reported a weaker effect than the original as well.

What this means for meetings

The studies were about students and lectures, not meetings, and none of them allowed people to review their notes before the quiz. So be careful extending them. Still, three practical points hold up:

• Choose the medium you are fastest and most comfortable with. The evidence no longer says one is clearly better.
• Don't transcribe. Both studies found typing pushes people toward verbatim notes. Selecting what matters is the useful part.
• Review soon. Notes only help if you read them again, ideally the same day.

One exception: exact words

There are moments where verbatim is exactly what you want: a number, a commitment, a quote you'll need to repeat. Write those word for word, whatever you're writing with. Everything else, put in your own words.

Questions people ask

Sources