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The Death of Cursive and the Repercussions
According to an article by Christopher Bergland in Psychology Today, “accumulating evidence suggests that not learning cursive handwriting may hinder the brain’s optimum potential to learn and remember.” Thank you for validating what we educators have been saying for years: students remember material better when they take longhand notes rather than type into a computer. I’ve preached it. If you had a me as a professor, you know that I’ve shared these findings with you. Mind you, I’m not discounting the importance and relevance of digital devices, I’m merely focused on retention of information via handwritten notes. In study after study, the results are in: there is a direct correlation…
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Tell Your College Students to Pull Out the Old Pen and Paper, Studies Find
You may want to tell your college students to put their laptops away during class lectures. It appears the “old way” of taking handwritten notes in class trumps typing notes into your laptop. If you’d like to know why, a study by researchers Pam A. Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the University of California, Los Angeles, found that taking notes by hand wins out for several reasons. Taking notes by hand offers you the opportunity to write key points as you listen, which engages active listening in students. Students are more selective and write down main ideas, and they highlight and circle things that seem to be…
