Those studies are usually done on students (because they are readily available as research subjects) and those tend to be "digital natives" who are quite used to keyboards.
From an article[1] about one such study:
The results revealed that while the two types of note-takers performed equally well on questions that involved recalling facts, laptop note-takers performed significantly worse on the conceptual questions.
The notes from laptop users contained more words and more verbatim overlap with the lecture, compared to the notes that were written by hand. Overall, students who took more notes performed better, but so did those who had less verbatim overlap, suggesting that the benefit of having more content is canceled out by “mindless transcription.”
“It may be that longhand note takers engage in more processing than laptop note takers, thus selecting more important information to include in their notes, which enables them to study this content more efficiently,” the researchers write.
I.e. because a keyboard lets you take more notes, you have to think less about them. Good for literal transcription, bad for actually understanding.
Of course this suggests that taking notes on a laptop might be better if you make it more difficult. E.g. if you had to retype your notes multiple times to avoid them fading away, that would certainly improve retention and encourage conceptualization.
You could also enhance it by sending each typed-out word to a text-to-speech engine, thus adding another sensory reinforcement.
But as it is currently practiced, taking notes on a computer apparently still loses out to pen and paper.
From an article[1] about one such study:
The results revealed that while the two types of note-takers performed equally well on questions that involved recalling facts, laptop note-takers performed significantly worse on the conceptual questions.
The notes from laptop users contained more words and more verbatim overlap with the lecture, compared to the notes that were written by hand. Overall, students who took more notes performed better, but so did those who had less verbatim overlap, suggesting that the benefit of having more content is canceled out by “mindless transcription.”
“It may be that longhand note takers engage in more processing than laptop note takers, thus selecting more important information to include in their notes, which enables them to study this content more efficiently,” the researchers write.
I.e. because a keyboard lets you take more notes, you have to think less about them. Good for literal transcription, bad for actually understanding.
Of course this suggests that taking notes on a laptop might be better if you make it more difficult. E.g. if you had to retype your notes multiple times to avoid them fading away, that would certainly improve retention and encourage conceptualization. You could also enhance it by sending each typed-out word to a text-to-speech engine, thus adding another sensory reinforcement.
But as it is currently practiced, taking notes on a computer apparently still loses out to pen and paper.
[1] http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/take-notes...