Students, high school students, college students: pen or computer, what is the best way to take notes ?

Au collège, au lycée ou à l’université, le crayon et le papier ont peu à peu laissé la place aux outils numériques.

Au collège, au lycée ou à l’université, le crayon et le papier ont peu à peu laissé la place aux outils numériques. Pourtant, selon des chercheurs norvégiens, prendre des notes à la main entraînerait une connectivité cérébrale plus élevée, améliorant la mémoire.

To take note of a new lesson: the pencil or the computer ? If everyone does what they like, science seems to support the first method. "When writing by hand, brain connectivity patterns are much more elaborate than when taking notes on a keyboard", explains Professor Audrey van der Meer, from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

What is beneficial

"Such brain connectivity is known to be crucial for memory formation and for the encoding of new information and, therefore, is beneficial for learning", replies the researcher.

To reach this conclusion, the team of researchers collected electroencephalogram (EEG) data from 36 students asked several times to write or type a word appearing on a screen. Objective: measure and record the electrical activity of the brain.

Keyboard or pencil

Result, the connectivity of different regions of the brain increased when the participants wrote by hand, but not when they used the keyboard. For the authors, brain activity is stimulated by the manual formation of letters. On the contrary, "the simple movement of repeatedly pressing a key with the same finger is less stimulating to the brain. This also explains why children who learned to write and read on a tablet may have difficulty telling the difference between letters that are mirrors of each other, such as "b" and the "d". They literally did not feel with their bodies what one feels when producing these letters", indicates Professor van der Meer.

Thus, for the authors, even if it is important to follow technological advances, "it is appropriate to give students the possibility of use pens, rather than letting them type during class."