For a while now, I've heard the claim that "studies show" that note-takers remember content better if they take notes by hand versus on a computer. I previously took this claim on face value in part because this was before I'd heard about the replication crisis and also because I'd had personal experiences that I believed supported this claim.

In light of the replication crisis and recent experiences, I've come to be more skeptical of this research. I started to look at some of the research pop science articles on the topic cite and am skeptical of the work I've looked at so far.

In the example I link to above, they have subjects perform two tasks, a recall and recognition task for words they handwrote or typed with a multiplication task in between writing and recalling/recognizing. They find a not significant difference between recalled words for handwriting vs. typing and a barely (p-value .03) significant difference between recognized words for the two groups. However, if you look at the standard deviations for the means for the two tasks, you'll see that each mean is in the other's 1-SD range.

Furthermore, the task they describe is simple but not necessarily that relevant to what's really going on when someone takes notes on a lecture / talk. They intentionally used semantically meaningless words (for understandable reasons) whereas real-life talks hopefully have higher-level meaning and themes.

ETA (after initial posting): Just found another paper that a few pop-sci articles seem to cite. This paper covers three experiments, which are all more realistic than the one I described above. I'm only going to discuss the first here.

The first had participants watch TED talks, take notes on them (either on a laptop or by hand) and then answer a combination of "factual" and "conceptual" questions about them. At a high level, they interpret the results of this experiment as showing that laptop note-takers did as well as the by hand note-takers on factual questions but worse on conceptual questions. (However, this is only the case after they convert to z-scores. That is, the differences between raw grades are not significant.) They also find that a difference between laptop note-takers and by hand note-takers is that the laptop note-takers write more and tend to copy the lecturers words more exactly. When they control for these factors, they find a much weaker effect o

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