The consequences of taking fewer notes by hand

Barcelona"You will hang the notes in the classroom"Això ho trobarem al campus virtual?". sporadically with the company on the coast, "recognizes Martina, a university student. 80% of her professors have the contingut to the virtual classroom, and therefore, approximately the most important thing is the material that is explained to the classroom. La Ioana, 22 years old, is also a university student and, in her home, 70% of the contingut that is The virtual classroom is the one the teacher gives. "You can pass without joining the class because you repeat the material," he admits. At Batxillerat, he recalls, there were more notes because it couldn't be used as a study technique. "It's changed because studying the capitals of Europe isn't the material, it's giving a reflective class."

It's clear that the emergence of new technologies has shaken up the way we learn in the classroom, and one of the many consequences is that students take far fewer handwritten notes than before because many teachers share part of the content with their students online. "We've also fully embraced digital books, which now include a ready-made summary of the theory," adds Xavier Gual, a high school teacher. For Enric Prats, professor of pedagogy at the Faculty of Education at the University of Barcelona, ​​​​teaching practice determines how students take these notes. "If you pass around a theoretical PowerPoint presentation, it doesn't make sense to take notes, but if you include an image or a graph, then it does," he explains.

But how does the decline in this practice affect students? According to Francesc Juan Roig, a vocational training teacher in the Balearic Islands, the fact that what a teacher explains is posted on theclassroomThis automatically decreases students' attention in class. Furthermore, not taking notes causes them to lose the habit of writing. "One of the biggest complaints from teachers is that students don't know how to write, but they don't know how because they're not in the habit of doing so," he complains. And he adds a third consequence: it stops fostering young people's autonomy. "If everything is posted online and one day a student doesn't come to class, they lose interest in what has been done because they already know they'll have it online. If that weren't the case, they'd be forced to ask for the notes and get a move on," he exemplifies.

According to Gual, adding that students' handwriting is increasingly worse—also blamed on the emergence of computers in the classroom—and have less patience. "It's very difficult for them to concentrate for more than five minutes." Taking notes or copying from the blackboard, he adds, makes them work their brain, their hand, and their concentration, and is also another way to study the content. In this sense, he points out that "memorization capacity" is being lost.

A statement shared by David Bueno, PhD in biology and professor and researcher in the Department of Biomedical, Evolutionary, and Developmental Genetics at the UB. "Several studies have confirmed that there is a loss of memory among students, but also among adults," he points out, and exemplifies this with the following question: "How many phone numbers do people know now and how many did they know twenty years ago?" But this memory loss, he clarifies, is not only attributed to writing less by hand. "There are other factors: such as the immediacy caused by digital technology or what are known as distracting elements. For example, many classroom walls are covered with student work, and although it can be beautiful, it is also very distracting when it comes to concentrating."

Writing activates more areas of the brain

Bueno asserts that one of the scientific benefits of taking handwritten notes is that more attention is paid to what is being said and that, when writing, more areas of the brain are activated. "This makes learning more efficient; that's why one of the techniques for memorizing is writing down the content. If you only read it, for example, you'll assimilate it less effectively." In fact, the UB researcher laments that working memory has lost "educational prestige." "We must be competent, but competencies are applied to things you must first know," he points out. Obviously, he adds, we don't have to know as many things as we did fifty years ago, but memory must be worked on from a young age. In this regard, he recalls that children have very limited memories, which is why they can only do two or three items simultaneously, such as taking off their coat, hanging it up, and sitting in a chair. By secondary school, they can already assimilate five or six, and adults, between five and nine. However, Bueno also warns that this memory doesn't function well under stress. "If stress is too high, you can't make the most of your memory, and children these days have a thousand things to do, so it will be difficult for them to achieve it."

'Bad practice' by teachers?

Gual, Roig, and Prats are clear that part of the responsibility for students taking fewer notes lies with the teachers themselves. "We are the teachers who must consider that if we don't make students write, they won't write on their own initiative," says Roig. "Anyone who puts a theoretical PowerPoint in the virtual classroom and then repeats it in class is making a mistake," Prats clarifies, admitting that, although some teachers do this, it is "bad practice." "You have to ask yourself what the role of the teacher is for. What value do students place on your work? You have to give something more than what you have written down, because if not, you have a lot to lose as a teacher: for starters, authority, in addition to being doomed to failure because a robot will replace you in two days," he clarifies.

To keep the class engaged, the three teachers use different tactics. Gual chooses to set an example for the students: "I'm the first to copy on the board, so they should do it in their notebooks too. I also expand on the content in the book because we've reached a point where everything is so summarized that it doesn't go into enough depth on certain aspects," he notes. However, he recalls, some students have even asked if they can take a photo of the notes on the board with their cell phones.

As for Roig, he never posts any content on the board. classroom, only reluctantly, sets the assessment criteria. "If at the beginning of the course I see that they're struggling to follow my explanations and take notes at the same time, I either speak more slowly or write it on the board. Sometimes, I even dictate until they get the hang of it," she explains.

Prados, on the other hand, does choose to use PowerPoints, but they're never theoretical. "I can upload an image of a data graph to interest me in analyzing it, and what the students write down is up to them," she explains. In her case, she's seen all kinds of note-taking methods: from recording classes to using a computer or mobile phone.

A habit that must be worked on from primary school

To give them a solid foundation for note-taking, Roig advocates encouraging the habit of writing from primary school onwards, so that students won't be "lazy" in secondary school. "If you've acquired this habit from the beginning, you'll write quickly and, therefore, you'll be able to listen and take notes. If not, it's impossible," he clarifies. However, the characteristics of each school determine whether this practice is practiced more or less. Eloi, who attends sixth grade at a state-funded school in Barcelona, ​​has only just begun taking notes this year, although he isn't aware of it. "He does it during laboratory exercises, where he must present a dossier with everything he's done and must include the notes he's taken in class and the reflections he's reached," explains his mother.

In fact, the introduction of note-taking in primary school, as long as the school gives it "systematic importance," happens much earlier than families think. "It's a task that extends over all six years because it requires a certain level of maturity from the child: you start with small things and gradually expand until it becomes part of a disposition that will help the child work in a certain way," explains Mar Hurtado, president of the Rosa Sensat Teachers' Association. There are different ways to do it. We could say that the first notes they take are those in the diary, which begins to be used in the first grade. "It helps you capture the most important ideas of the day, and it's very useful to work on it systematically," explains Hurtado.

Another way is to copy. "It's the first basic learning process in which, in addition, they must also pay attention to how words are written, analyze them, and be aware that the basic ideas they copy remain on paper that can be consulted." The notifications that must be sent to families about daily classroom activities are a third option. "For example, to communicate an outing, a summary of what is needed and what is not; in short, ideas must be collected and then transmitted." And finally, a fourth way of learning is through what is known as concept mapping. "When project work is done, new knowledge emerges, new words that teachers initially compile into a concept map so the children don't get lost, and as the project progresses, it's the children who take more of a role. They don't write long essays, but they do learn to summarize at first glance," she points out.

The same thing happens in secondary schools as in secondary schools; each center approaches it in its own way. Anna is a teacher at a highly complex public secondary school in the Barcelona metropolitan area, and in her case, she directly admits that the students "don't know how to take notes." "Attempts are made, but the vast majority don't succeed. We, however, have many more difficulties than other centers because there are many students in the reception classroom, and when they upload enough work to class, they have enough time to understand what is being done to take notes." In this case, he adds, so that they can follow the classes, they opt to work directly with digital books, paper books, or give them photocopies with the content.

Sergi, Eloi's brother, who is in the second year of compulsory secondary education at a state-subsidized secondary school, explains that he takes more or less notes depending on the teacher and the subject he is assigned. "For natural sciences, for example, they basically give us PowerPoints and what we do is copy them, while in social studies we have a physical book and we have to make our own summaries," he exemplifies. "In the rest of the subjects we make dossiers and follow the guidelines that the teachers give us," he adds. a mix between the notes that the teachers post on classroom and the ones he writes by hand. "It changes depending on the subject, but I also see that they haven't quite mastered the schemes we used to make thirty years ago," he concludes.