People who take notes do better on later tests than people who don’t, but only modestly, according to a 2005 meta-analysis of 57 studies.¹ A separate 2006 meta-analysis found substantial effects when people also went back and reviewed what they wrote.²

Why take notes, then? Researchers credit notes with two jobs. Writing them makes you process material as it arrives, and the page you end up with is a record you can review later. In studies of students, people who could review their notes gained more than people who could not, so notes pay off best when you use them again.

Why take notes: one job while you write, one job afterwards

Note-taking research has long split the benefit of notes into two functions, as a 2017 review by Renée Jansen, Daniel Lakens and Wijnand IJsselsteijn of Eindhoven University of Technology explains: the encoding function, the deeper processing that happens while you take notes, and the external storage function, the benefit of having notes to review and rehearse later. The split goes back to a 1972 study by Di Vesta and Gray.³

Kenneth Kiewra organized a 1989 review around the same pair. The encoding function holds that taking notes helps even if you never look at them again; the storage function holds that reviewing notes helps too.⁴

The difference matters for where your effort goes. If all the value lay in the writing, you could throw the notebook away after the meeting. If most of it lies in review, notes are only as useful as your habit of returning to them, and the research on students below points that way.

Writing notes helps a little; reviewing them adds more

The benefit of taking notes, compared with not taking them, is modest, according to Keiichi Kobayashi’s 2005 meta-analysis of 57 studies; in his 2006 meta-analysis of 33 studies, taking notes and then reviewing them had substantial effects.¹²

Earlier meta-analyses had already found the benefit of taking notes positive but modest, and Kobayashi set out to explain why. His analysis showed where the benefit shrinks. Visual presentation of the material interfered with note-taking, recall tests picked up the benefit better than recognition tests or tests of higher-order understanding, and neither interventions meant to improve note-taking nor a higher schooling level made the benefit larger. He suggested that the modest effect comes from the mechanical demands of taking notes, the kind of test used and features of the publications, not from gaps in how students take notes on their own.¹ His average effect size was 0.22, as a 2024 meta-analysis by Zhouhan Jin and Stuart Webb of the University of Western Ontario reports it.⁵

Those mechanical demands are heavy. The 2017 Eindhoven review breaks note-taking during a lecture into five processes that run in a loop many times per lecture, and draws a first conclusion from them: taking notes loads the mind more than simply understanding the lecture does.³

1. 1Understandfollow what is being said
2. 2Pick key pointsdecide what matters
3. 3Linkto what you know and earlier notes
4. 4Condenseparaphrase or summarize
5. 5Write or typeget it onto the page

Then repeat from “Understand”

Review is where the effort is repaid. Kobayashi’s 2006 meta-analysis compared students who took and reviewed notes with students who did neither and found substantial overall effects. Help with the procedure added a modest extra benefit: giving students a framework or the instructor’s notes worked better than training or verbal instructions, and students at lower academic levels gained more from that help.² Jin and Webb’s summary of the first-language research points the same way: people who had a chance to review their notes learned more than those who did not.⁵

One caution runs through all of this: the two Kobayashi meta-analyses used different sets of studies, pooled students at different schooling levels, and were read here as abstracts only, so comparing them cannot say how much extra review itself adds. We found no study measuring the benefit for adults taking notes in meetings or on calls.

1. Taking notes: writing makes you process what you hear; on its own, a modest benefit on later tests
2. Reviewing them: the notes become a store to study from; taking plus reviewing had substantial effects in a separate meta-analysis
3. Time between: review later and more than once, and test yourself instead of rereading

Notes free your head for the next thing

Writing something down also lets you stop holding it in mind. Psychologists call this cognitive offloading, defined in a 2016 review by Evan Risko of the University of Waterloo and Sam Gilbert of University College London as using physical action to reduce the mental demands of a task, like setting a phone reminder for an appointment.⁶

Offloading can help you learn the next thing. In three experiments published in 2015, Benjamin Storm and Sean Stone of the University of California, Santa Cruz, found that saving one file before studying a new file improved memory for the new file. The effect did not appear when the saving was unreliable, or when the first file held too little to get in the way.⁷ In two experiments published in 2024, Craig Fellers and Storm found the effect when people saved only some items in a list, whether they saved them by clicking a button or by writing them out by hand. Their studies, like the earlier ones they describe, used lists of words in a lab.⁸ Treat them as a demonstration of the mechanism rather than a measured benefit at work.

The flip side is that what you offload, you may not keep. In a 2014 study by Michelle Eskritt of Mount Saint Vincent University in Canada and Sierra Ma, people played a memory card game after either studying the cards or making notes that were then unexpectedly taken away. The two groups remembered the cards’ identities about as well, but the note-takers remembered their locations worse, which the authors read as deliberate forgetting of what the notes were holding.⁹

A note on where you stopped can also ease a switch between tasks. In a 2018 paper reporting four studies, Sophie Leroy and Theresa Glomb found that when people expected time pressure on returning to an interrupted task, briefly planning that return reduced their attention residue, and their work on the interrupting task no longer suffered.¹⁰ A two-line note on where you stopped is one way to make that plan.

Copying word for word did less than summarizing, with one exception

Notes in your own words beat notes copied word for word in a 1979 experiment by Bretzing and Kulhavy, described in the 2013 review of study techniques by John Dunlosky of Kent State University and four colleagues. High school juniors and seniors read a 2,000-word text, and after each page some wrote a three-line summary, some took up to three lines of notes, some copied the three most important lines, some copied capitalized words and some only read. On questions that required connecting information across the text, whether tested soon after or a week later, the summarizers and note-takers did best.¹¹

That does not make summarizing a cure-all. The same review rated summarization low utility overall, because many learners, even some undergraduates, need extensive training to do it well and results varied by task.¹¹

There is also an exception to the rule against copying. In three experiments reported in 2013, Dung Bui, Joel Myerson and Sandra Hale found that people who tried to transcribe a lecture on a computer recalled the most on immediate tests. Organized notes did best on delayed tests in the second experiment, but in the third, when people could study their notes first, the transcribers did better. For the transcribers, the amount they wrote was the one consistent predictor of recall.¹²

Further reading

• 

  Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

  by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel

  A readable account of retrieval practice and spaced review, the self-testing routine this article suggests for going back over your notes.

As an Amazon Associate WiserHours earns from qualifying purchases.

Laptop or pen: the famous finding has not held up well

The idea that handwritten notes beat typed ones comes mostly from one 2014 paper. Pam Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel Oppenheimer of the University of California, Los Angeles, reported in three studies that students who took notes on laptops did worse on conceptual questions than students who wrote by hand, and blamed laptop users’ tendency to transcribe lectures word for word. A 2018 correction fixed errors in the statistics, and the authors wrote that the results stayed qualitatively the same.¹³ In the third study, the difference appeared only among students who studied their notes before a quiz a week later.¹⁴

The typing part of that finding held up. In a 2021 replication, laptop users wrote about 231 words of notes on average against 136 for handwriters, with more of the lecturer’s exact wording.¹⁴

The learning part did not hold up in the same 2021 study.

The study

Mixed evidence

Laptop versus pen, repeated with 142 Tufts students in 2021

Heather Urry of Tufts University and a class of student co-authors repeated the first Mueller and Oppenheimer study with 142 undergraduates. Laptop notes again held more words and more verbatim wording, but quiz scores did not differ: on conceptual questions, laptop users scored 74 percent and handwriters 70 percent, not a significant difference. Pooling 8 similar studies of undergraduates tested the same day, the team found no clear difference in quiz scores between longhand and laptop notes.¹⁴

For someone choosing a tool, that means the typing itself is unlikely to be what makes or breaks learning from a talk. The caveat is the setting: a short video in a lab and a quiz half an hour later, with no chance to review, which is not how most courses or jobs work.¹⁴

Other studies point the same way or only slightly the other. Kayla Morehead, John Dunlosky and Katherine Rawson of Kent State University repeated the experiment twice in 2019, adding students who wrote on eWriter tablets and, in the second experiment, a group who took no notes. Performance did not consistently differ between any groups, differences shrank further after students studied their notes, and their pooled analysis found no significant advantage for longhand.¹⁵

The strongest case for the pen comes from a 2024 meta-analysis of 24 studies of college students by Abraham Flanigan, Kenneth Kiewra and colleagues: taking and reviewing handwritten notes was linked to higher achievement by a small margin (g = 0.25), while typists took far more notes (g = 0.92).¹⁶ It pooled experimental and quasi-experimental studies and was read here as an abstract only.

Myth

Research has proven that handwritten notes beat typed notes.

Fact

The best-known study did not hold up in a 2021 direct replication; a 2024 meta-analysis found only a small handwriting advantage. The question is open.

The Tufts team adds a practical point the experiments did not test: laptops can distract, and some students with disabilities need them to learn at all.¹⁴

How to get more out of the notes you take

To get more out of your notes, review them, test yourself from them, condense them when you can, offload open items and use a tool you will go back to. Review comes first because it has the strongest support, from Kobayashi’s 2006 meta-analysis.²

1. Plan to review, and put it in the calendar

In the first-language research Jin and Webb summarize, people who could review their notes learned more than those who could not.⁵ Block a short review slot after an important talk or meeting, and another a few days later. The 2013 Dunlosky review rated spreading study out over time, called distributed practice, as high utility.¹¹

2. Test yourself from your notes instead of rereading them

The same review rated practice testing high utility and rereading low. Cover the page, recall what it says, then check: the same routine as retrieval practice with spaced reviews, applied to your own notes. The review names the Cornell note-taking system, with its blank column for key terms or questions added shortly after class, as one way to set notes up for self-testing.¹¹

3. Put ideas in your own words when you can keep up

Summarizing beat copying in the 1979 experiment Dunlosky’s review describes.¹¹ When the talk is too fast to condense, capture more and condense later: in the 2013 computer experiments, trying to transcribe paid off for people who could study their notes.¹²

4. Write down what you do not need to hold in mind

Offloading an open item onto paper can leave more room for what you are learning now, as long as the saved copy is reliable.⁷ Before switching tasks, write where you stopped and what comes next.¹⁰

5. Choose the tool you will actually go back to

Laptop or pen made no clear difference in same-day lab tests.¹⁴ Pick the one that keeps you off other tabs and leaves notes you will find and review.

WiserHours

After your next talk, class or meeting

• Schedule a short review today and another in a few days
• Cover your notes and recall before you reread
• Add questions or key terms in the margin
• Condense copied passages into your own words
• Write down open items before switching tasks
• Keep notes where you will look for them

Find this checklist online:
https://wiserhours.com/note-taking/why-take-notes/#checklist-why-take-notes-habits

Evidence at a glance: what notes do and how sure we are

In studies of students, the best-supported reason to take notes is to have something to review, according to Kobayashi’s two meta-analyses; the evidence on writing in your own words and on offloading is thinner, and the laptop-versus-pen question remains mixed.¹²

The bottom line

Much of what notes offer comes after you write them: taking notes gave a modest benefit in Kobayashi’s 2005 meta-analysis, while taking and reviewing them had substantial effects in his 2006 one.¹² Whatever you write with, plan the review when you take the notes, and spend it testing yourself rather than rereading.