Why laptops should be banned in law school: Comprehension of material suffers

Whether the laptops are used solely to take notes, or not, laptops are not a great way to aid learning:

The study of undergraduate students compared comprehension for students who took notes on laptops and those who took handwritten notes, according to Suffolk law professor Steven Eisenstat. The students using laptops had no access to the Internet and no other computer distractions, yet their performance on later tests was worse than those who took notes by hand.

Comprehension suffers for the laptop users because they tend to type their professors’ words verbatim, without trying to understand the meaning, Eisenstat says. He makes his case in an article available at SSRN that is set for publication in the University of Detroit Mercy Law Review. TaxProf Blog notes his paper.

Article here. 

Studying law ruins reading for pleasure. It's a fact.

OK, maybe not a fact. But I know it took me a few years after law school to begin reading for pleasure again. Why? Because after all the case books and exams, reading fiction seemed pointless. No fictional character needs to have a problem solved by the the book's reader (except maybe in a choose-your-own-adventure novel).

And the ABA anecdotally backs up my anecdote:

In the November issue of the ABA Journal, Black’s Law Dictionary editor-in-chief Bryan Garner writes about an encounter with a law firm partner who approached him with a problem: Ever since law school, she’s found herself scouring whatever she’s reading for the most relevant, skimming “for the main point—as if for a holding. But in literature, it’s not there.”

Article here (via ABA journal). 

The next bar exam is only how many days away?

If you're studying, don't panic. You still have time to cram in some subject you are worried about, and do all that extra essay practice that's on your damned study schedule.

Since you need something to laugh about, though, here's an interview with a bar exam lecturer who's been at it --lecturing on Torts for Barbri, that is --  for 24 years.

More evidence: Lawyers should be taking notes by hand

Yet another study showing that long-hand note taking is superior as a means of retention than note taking via laptops.

Article here.  (via the Lawyerist).

It turns out that typing speed is a big part of the problem. When you have a keyboard, you have a very strong tendency to transcribe what you hear, even if you try not to. But when taking notes by hand, you have to (a) pay attention and (b) decide what is important.

Why all-night study session are a bad idea: brain builds memory while you sleep

As you sleep, your brain is actually forming new neural connections, helping you retain the things you learned during the day, according to a new study.

Article here.(via Instapundit)

I personally can count on one hand the number of times I "pulled an all-nighter" or close to it, to cram for an exam or finish working on a paper. I can't say that it helped, but I always thought it was better than nothing.

More isn't necessarily better: Longhand note taking leads to better retention than laptop note taking.

Obviously it is advantageous to draft more complete notes that precisely capture the course content and allow for a verbatim review of the material at a later date.  Only it isn’t.  New research by Pam Mueller [Princeton] and Daniel Oppenheimer [UCLA] demonstrates that students who write out their notes on paper actually learn more [The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking]. 

Across three experiments, Mueller and Oppenheimer had students take notes in a classroom setting and then tested students on their memory for factual detail, their conceptual understanding of the material, and their ability to synthesize and generalize the information.  Half of the students were instructed to take notes with a laptop, and the other half were instructed to write the notes out by hand.  As in other studies, students who used laptops took more notes. 

In each study, however, those who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who used took notes with their laptops.

Article here. (via taxprof blog)

Personal note: I was a longhand note taker in almost every class. I think the one exception to that was Pre-Trial Skills class. And the same thing held true for when I crammed for the bar exam. My method was to take notes in class, and then later condense the notes to flash cards before the exam, and sometimes a spreadsheet/outline. My lucky husband sometimes helped me review by quizzing me on what was on the cards.

And I know that the times where I tried to get every piece of information on a flash card -- which was when I crammed during bar prep for a topic I never took as a class (like No-Fault Insurance)-- or for weeks that I missed class or totally didn't get part of the topic -- I couldn't remember what was on the darned cards. The flash cards I did the best at remembering were one and two sentence cards, where I had previously digested the material via notes taken from class.