The famous study, and how to hold it
80 min
Two hosts talk the lesson through. The voices are synthetic; the script was written from this lesson and checked against it, and asserts nothing the lesson does not.
- State what Mueller and Oppenheimer's three studies reported and what mechanism they proposed
- State at what read level this course holds that study, and explain why the level matters here
- Say what a published corrigendum is and what this one corrects, at the level this course can support
This is the study you have heard of. Your colleagues have heard of it, the person who told you to write by hand has heard of it, and almost nobody has read it, including this course.
That last part isn't an aside. It's what the lesson is about.
What it says
Mueller and Oppenheimer published it in Psychological Science in 2014.1 This course read the abstract and did not open the paper, so everything below is at that level and the lesson will keep saying so.
Their abstract, quoted in full, because it is the whole of what this course has:1
Taking notes on laptops rather than in longhand is increasingly common. Many researchers have suggested that laptop note taking is less effective than longhand note taking for learning. Prior studies have primarily focused on students' capacity for multitasking and distraction when using laptops. The present research suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing. In three studies, we found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand. We show that whereas taking more notes can be beneficial, laptop note takers' tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.
Four things are in there and it's worth separating them. The four-way split is this course's reading, not a division the authors make2, and the parts aren't equally strong.
The result. In three studies, laptop note-takers did worse on conceptual questions.
The scope. Conceptual questions, not everything. The abstract says so and almost nobody quoting it does.
The condition. Even when laptops were used solely to take notes. That is the sentence that made the paper matter, because it separates the claim from the older one about distraction.
The mechanism, which is a proposal rather than a result. Transcription is shallower than reframing, and the shallower processing is what costs you. Notice how they hedge it: "The present research suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning".
The trade the mechanism describes
The proposed account has two sides and most retellings keep one.
Typing gets more of the talk onto the page, which lesson 2 says is the numerator and which lesson 5 has the evidence for. The abstract concedes only that more can be worth having: "taking more notes can be beneficial".1 Handwriting gets less onto the page and forces you to decide what goes there, which is the reframing.
Reading it as a trade rather than a defect is this course's own way of putting it, not a division the authors make.2 More words and less processing, against fewer words and more processing. A retelling that says "typing is worse" has dropped the half the authors put in their own abstract, and lesson 5 has the evidence on whether the extra words buy anything. They do not.
Before you read on. If that mechanism is right, what would you expect to see in the notes themselves, separately from the test scores? Write one sentence.
Show the answer
The prediction is specific and it matters in lesson 4, so it is worth having in your own words first.
You would expect typed notes to contain more words, and more of the speaker's exact words. That is what "transcribe lectures verbatim" means as a measurable thing, and it is a property of the document rather than of the person.
Which gives the claim two halves that can come apart, and that's the part to hold onto. One half is about the notes: typists transcribe more. The other half is about the outcome: transcribing more costs you on conceptual questions.
A study could confirm the first and fail to find the second, and if it did, the claim would be in an interesting state rather than simply refuted. Lesson 4 is what happened.
The read level, and why this lesson makes it the point
This course did not open the paper. What it has is the abstract, from the PubMed record (PMID 24760141), which carries it in full.1
So there's no sample size in this lesson, and no effect size. The abstract gives neither. If you've seen a number attached to this study, it came from somewhere else, and this course can't tell you whether that somewhere was the paper.
That restriction is worth more than the numbers would be, and here's why. What follows is this course's reading of how the study travels rather than a measurement of it, because nothing read here counted how it is quoted.2 The sentences everybody repeats about this study are the sentences in the abstract. The conditions everybody drops are also in the abstract, three lines from the sentence they're dropping. Dropping "on conceptual questions" is not something a paywall can explain: the condition sits in the same abstract as the claim.
One sentence, two ways
This sentence is constructed and is not from any source.2
A speaker says: "The pilot ran for eleven weeks in two regions, and the drop-out rate was about a third, which is roughly what the earlier trial saw."
Transcribed, a typist gets most of that down: eleven weeks, two regions, a third, the earlier trial.
Paraphrased, somebody writing by hand might get: "11wk pilot, 2 regions, dropout ~1/3, same as last trial."
What the paraphrase preserved: every number, and the comparison, which is the thing the speaker was making.
What it lost: the word "about", the word "roughly", and "which is roughly what" becoming "same as". Three hedges, gone.
That is the trade in one sentence. The paraphrase is shorter and it is the one you can read in a month, and it has quietly turned two approximations into a claim of equality. Neither version is the right one in general, and which one you want depends on what the note is for, which is lesson 1.
Worked: the trace
This is an account of what this course actually did, not a demonstration, and it is here because walking it is more useful than the result.2 It has four steps, in the form Memory lesson 4 used.
- The paper is Mueller and Oppenheimer, 2014, Psychological Science 25(6), pages 1159 to
- Every record this course saw agrees on those details.
- The full text was not reached. What was reached was the PubMed record, which carries the abstract in full. Whether the paper is reachable somewhere this course did not look is not something the trace establishes.
- The same search turns up something the retellings do not: a published corrigendum, in the same journal, four years later.
- So this lesson holds the study at abstract level, and holds the corrigendum at the level of its existence and its subject.
That's the trace and it ended at step four. It is one of the five endings Habits and Self-Discipline lesson 7 and Focus and Deep Work lesson 7 both name, recast for a paper rather than a number, which Memory lesson 4 did first and this lesson reuses: the trail leads somewhere you cannot get to.
Before the next section. A paper you rely on turns out to carry a published correction, four years after it appeared. Write down what you would be entitled to conclude from that fact alone.
Show the answer
Less than most people assume, and the answer is in the section below.
From the fact alone: that the authors found something in their own paper that needed correcting, and said so in public. Nothing about how big it was, nothing about whether the conclusions survive it, and nothing about whether anybody citing the paper has noticed.
The thing most people conclude is that the paper is discredited, and the second thing they conclude, on being told it is only a correction, is that it therefore does not matter. Both are verdicts on a document nobody has read.
The corrigendum
In 2018 a correction to the 2014 paper appeared in the same journal.1
What this course knows about it, at search-summary level, is what class of thing it concerns: the z scores in the data files deposited with the paper were computed before some participants were excluded and were never recalculated. A z score states a number relative to the spread of its own sample, so excluding people changes every one of them, and one study's z scores had been computed differently from the other two.
What this course doesn't know is what difference that makes, because nobody here has read the corrigendum. The lesson won't tell you, and a lesson that guessed would be doing the thing the whole course is against.
Three things are worth saying about corrigenda in general. None of them comes from anything read for this course; they are the conventions of academic publishing as this course understands them.2
A corrigendum isn't a retraction. The paper stands. The authors are correcting something in it.
A corrigendum is published by the authors, which is different from a comment, where somebody else raises an objection the authors may reject. Lesson 6 has one of those.
And a corrigendum is a good sign about the authors and an awkward sign about the literature. Correcting your own paper four years later is what you'd want everybody to do. The awkward part is that the paper had been cited very widely by then, and a citation doesn't update.
So should you stop believing the famous study? It is held here at abstract level, its conditions are routinely dropped, and it carries a correction.
Show the answer
No, and the reasons are more interesting than a verdict.
Nothing above is a finding against the study. Not being able to open a paper is a fact about this course. A correction published by the authors is a fact in the paper's favour. And conditions being dropped in retellings is a fact about the retellings.
The study is a real experiment reporting a real result, and lesson 5 will show you that five separate syntheses of this question all point the same direction, and that three of the five clear zero and two do not. Neither half of that sentence can be left off.
What you should stop doing is quoting it without its conditions. "Laptop note-takers performed worse on conceptual questions, in three studies, and the authors propose verbatim transcription as the reason" is one sentence longer than what people say, and it is what the abstract says.
And you should hold the mechanism more loosely than the result. The result is what they measured. The mechanism is what they propose to explain it, and a proposal is the part of a paper most likely to be wrong. Lesson 4 is the case.
Three things people get wrong about this study
"It proved handwriting is better." It reported worse performance on conceptual questions in three studies, and proposed a reason.
"It was about distraction." The abstract says the opposite in terms: the claim is about laptops used solely to take notes.
"The correction means it was wrong." A corrigendum is a correction by the authors to a paper that stands. What this one changes isn't something this course can tell you.
Practice
Take 20 minutes, and put it down at twenty whether or not the trail has ended. This is Memory lesson 4's trace exercise again, on a claim from a different subject, and doing it twice is the point.
Pick a study everybody in your field quotes and nobody you know has read.
Follow it back, writing each step.
- Who cites it, and what do they cite? If nothing, write "nothing", and you are finished.
- Find the record. Can you reach the full text? Not an abstract, not a summary.
- If you reach it, does it say what you were told? Check one specific claim.
- Does the record show a correction or a comment? Most people have never looked.
Five endings and all of them count: you reach it and it agrees; you reach it and it does not; the trail ends in nothing; the trail ends somewhere you cannot get to; or twenty minutes went.
The fourth is the commonest and it's what happened to this lesson.
Take 15 minutes.
Take a paragraph of something you have not read before. A news article, a page of a report, a section of a manual.
Write it out verbatim, as much as you can in four minutes.
Then, from the paragraph again, write it in your own words in four minutes.
Then three lines.
- How many words each one is.
- Which one you could reconstruct the paragraph from a week later, as a guess.
- Which one was harder, and where exactly the effort went.
This isn't a test of the mechanism. One person doing it once can't test anything, which Memory lessons 2 and 6 both explain. What it gives you is the feel of the trade the authors describe, which is worth having before lesson 4 tells you what happened when people checked it.
Connections
Back. Lesson 2 is the denominator, and the verbatim measure in this study is a numerator with a denominator attached, which is why it is unusually well defined. Memory lesson 4 is the trace at the same read level, on a different famous study, and this lesson uses its four steps rather than re-deriving them.
Forward. Lesson 4 is the direct replication and the extension, and it is where the two halves of this claim come apart. Lesson 5 is what twenty-four studies of the same question say together.
Go deeper
- The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking (Psychological Science, 2014). This course did not open it, and the link is to the publisher's record. If you can reach it, you will know something this course does not, which is the exercise above with a guaranteed result.
- Corrigendum: The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard (Psychological Science, 2018). Also not opened. Worth reaching for the same reason, and because most readers have never read a corrigendum for anything.
Sources
- Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer, "The pen is mightier than the keyboard: advantages of longhand over laptop note taking", Psychological Science 25(6), 2014, pp. 1159 to 1168. Read in part: the abstract verbatim, from the bibliographic record. The paper itself was not opened, and the body says so three times before Go deeper says it again. Supports: the abstract as quoted in full, and nothing else. The corrigendum, Psychological Science 29(9), 2018, pp. 1565 to 1568, was not read either; what this course has is the record that it exists and, at search-summary level, that it concerns z scores computed before participants were excluded and never recalculated. The body says in terms that the lesson cannot say what difference it makes.
- The four-step trace is this course's own account of what it did, said as such where it appears, and the five endings are Habits and Self-Discipline lesson 7's and Focus and Deep Work lesson 7's list recast for a paper rather than a number, which Memory lesson 4 did first; the trace section says so. The separation of the abstract into a result, a scope, a condition and a proposed mechanism is this course's own reading rather than a division the authors make, and is labelled where it appears. So is reading the mechanism as a trade rather than a defect. So is everything the lesson says about how the study travels when other people quote it, which nothing read here measures, and the section carrying it says so at its head. The general statements about what a corrigendum is, in the body and in the quiz, are the course's own and are not drawn from any source read here. The constructed sentence in the worked example below the abstract is invented, and is labelled where it appears.
Check your understanding
This lesson has a 6-question quiz. Pass it and the questions come back on a schedule in Review, so what you learned stays learned. Your progress is saved in your browser; no account needed.