Trends in Neuroscience and Education 5 (2016) 139–145
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Trends in Neuroscience and Education
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tine
Review article
Technology and note-taking in the classroom, boardroom, hospital
room, and courtroom
Pam A. Mueller a, Daniel M. Oppenheimer b,n
a
b
Princeton University, United States
UCLA Anderson School of Management, BOX 951481, B423A Gold Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1481, United States
art ic l e i nf o
a b s t r a c t
Article history:
Received 7 March 2016
Received in revised form
5 June 2016
Accepted 14 June 2016
Available online 16 June 2016
To date, technological interventions in note-taking have been generally unsuccessful in improving performance. One reason for this lack of success may be that developers focus on making note-taking easier,
while neglecting how the technologies could affect the other psychological processes underlying effective note-taking. Importantly, since note-taking serves different purposes in different situations, the
effectiveness of various technologies will also be situationally dependent. In this paper, we explore four
distinct note-taking settings: the classroom, the boardroom, the hospital room, and the courtroom. In
each section, we quickly review important past research before addressing the current state of notetaking in that arena, with special attention given to technological interventions. We conclude each
section with a short discussion of what kinds of new technologies would be most helpful for note-taking
in those situations.
& 2016 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.
Keywords:
Note-taking
Education
Technology
Business
Medicine
Law
Contents
1. The impact of technology
2. Classroom. . . . . . . . . . . . .
3. Boardroom . . . . . . . . . . . .
4. Hospital room . . . . . . . . .
5. Courtroom . . . . . . . . . . . .
6. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . .
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
on note-taking in the
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classroom, boardroom, hospital room, and courtroom .
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1. The impact of technology on note-taking in the classroom,
boardroom, hospital room, and courtroom
Experimental research on note-taking has a long history [1]; for
overviews, see Kiewra, Kobayashi [2,3]. While there is a great deal
of nuance and complexity in the literature, one consistent theme is
that note taking is not easy. The act of note taking requires a
number of simultaneous, cognitively demanding processes. The
note-taker has to comprehend the material, identify what content
is worth recording, and recreate that content in an abridged form.
The difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that the process typically
n
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: daniel.oppenheimer@anderson.ucla.edu (D.M. Oppenheimer).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tine.2016.06.002
2211-9493/& 2016 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.
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139
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143
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occurs under severe time pressure, often without opportunities for
reflection or clarification. In fact, it has been argued that notetaking can be as cognitively demanding as expert chess playing
[4].
This difficulty is reflected in the quality of notes that people
take. For example, it is not uncommon for people to fail to record
half of the main points within a lecture [5,6]. Given the challenges
inherent in note-taking, it seems plausible that technological innovations could be used to reduce cognitive burdens and facilitate
more effective note-taking. Unfortunately, to date there is a dearth
of examples of successful technology assisted note-taking. In fact,
the bulk of the literature shows that incorporating technology into
note-taking has either no effect or a deleterious effect.
The lack of effective technological interventions in note-taking
should not be interpreted to suggest that technology could never
140
P.A. Mueller, D.M. Oppenheimer / Trends in Neuroscience and Education 5 (2016) 139–145
Table 1
Summary of goals, challenges, and technology solutions across different domains.
Note-taking
situation
Goal (s)
Problems
How can technology help?
Classroom
Deep understanding of content
long-term learning
External record of material for
future review
Students taking notes on laptops have a
hard-to-overcome tendency to take verbatim
notes and thus fail to process lecture content
as deeply as longhand note takers
Tablet/stylus technology requires notes to be taken by
hand, but allows for a saved electronic copy
Technology that asks questions and helps students
think about notes being taken
Boardroom
Comprehensive and accurate record
of what was discussed for use by
self and others
Facilitate participation and idea
generation
Workers take notes at the expense of
participating in discussion
Typing notes on a laptop would lessen working
memory demands on employees, allowing them to
participate in meetings and still take detailed notes
Hospital room
Record information for future
reference over long-term treatment
and patient care
Documentation against malpractice
claims
Build and maintain trust with patient
Note-taking may interfere with patient
rapport
Lessintrusive note-taking would be less likely to impair rapport (e.g., tablet as opposed to laptop or
desktop)
Courtroom
Accurate account of witness interview
or witness testimony to refer to later
Maintain trust and satisfaction with
legal system
Interviewer notes tend to miss many
important pieces of information
Jurors are unsure what information is
important
“Smart pen” for interviewers, allowing audio recording
and contemporaneous notes
Structured note-taking guide for jurors
be helpful. Indeed, the rapid evolution and application of digital
technology to note-taking environments offers the hope of major
advances in note-taking technology in the near future. However,
for this to happen, developers of new technology need to understand what features the technology will need to have in order to
capitalize on our cognitive systems to improve note-taking. New
technologies should not only alleviate challenges that note-takers
face, but should also avoid undermining the processes that make
note-takers successful.
Of course, note-taking serves many different purposes, and the
technologies required to facilitate note-taking will therefore depend on the situation; appropriate technology will look different
for different goals. As such, in the present paper we will explore
four distinct note-taking settings: the classroom, the boardroom,
the hospital room, and the courtroom. While all of the settings
share a common goal of creating an external record for one's future reference, they differ in key other goals. In the classroom
setting (where the majority of past research has taken place), notetaking should serve to enhance learning and comprehension of the
material. In the boardroom, notes are often intended to create an
external record for someone else's use or reference, and occasionally are meant to facilitate (or at least not impede) exchange of
information. In the hospital room, note-taking needs to be done in
such a way as to avoid undermining rapport between patients and
health care workers. And in the courtroom, note taking can help
jurors identify legally relevant details of a case, and keep jurors
involved and satisfied with the legal process (see Table 1 for
summary).
As we turn to each distinct setting, we first give a quick overview of important past research and then address the current state
of note-taking and note-taking research with an emphasis on the
effectiveness of technological innovations. Finally, we will discuss
what sorts of technologies would be most helpful for the notetaking goals in each of the four arenas.
2. Classroom
non-trivial benefits for mastery of course materials [2,3]. Most
undergraduates take notes in their classes and think that notetaking is important for learning [7,8].
However, technology in the university classroom is changing
rapidly. Most current undergraduates have a laptop; studies suggest the proportion may be as high as 89–99% [10,11]. However,
the extent to which they use laptops to take notes in class varies
greatly across institutions. In our research, approximately twothirds of Princeton students reported regularly using a laptop to
take notes, while less than half of UCLA students reported doing so
[12]. Researchers at UCIrvine report that only 29% of students
bring their laptop to class every day [13].1
At this point, students seem to be ambivalent about note-taking
on laptops. They tend to believe that their ability to take more
notes quickly on a laptop is an asset, rather than a liability, noting
that efficiency is the biggest advantage of laptops [14]. Indeed,
students consistently report that they believe laptops are beneficial for learning [15–17]. Despite this, some students seem to
realize that by transcribing lectures, they are not processing or
understanding the content, as evidenced by studies that interview
students about note taking experiences, e.g., “[Y]ou have become a
typing machine…too busy writing down what is being said to
thoroughly process its contents.” [14], p. 46. Students at the University of North Carolina—Pembroke reported that compared to
laptops, tablets, and phones, using pen and paper for note-taking
was significantly more natural, efficient, easy, and effective [18].
They also reported an increased ability to express their thoughts
when using pen and paper. Despite this, 41% of the students reported that they used an electronic interface to take notes.
Just as students have mixed feelings about using laptops for
note-taking, the research on how laptop note-taking affects
learning outcomes is nuanced. While a number of studies have
shown that laptops can offer advantages for immediate factual
recall, [19–21] laptop note-takers do not perform as well as longhand note-takers on conceptual questions, or on recall of content
following a delay [12]. Mueller & Oppenheimer [12] randomly
assigned students to take notes on a short lecture either on a
The prototypical note-taking situation involves students, so it is
logical that the majority of note-taking research investigates academic situations. In general, note-taking has been shown to have
1
These studies are now several years old, and it is likely that an even higher
percentage of students carry laptops, though some may have replaced them with
tablets.
P.A. Mueller, D.M. Oppenheimer / Trends in Neuroscience and Education 5 (2016) 139–145
laptop or with a pen and paper. In a subsequent test, students
showed significantly better conceptual understanding when they
had hand-written the notes, even when given access to their notes
to study after a delay. Ironically, the very feature that makes laptop
note-taking so appealing – the ability to take notes more quickly –
was what undermined learning. When using a laptop, note-takers
tend to transcribe lecture content verbatim. However, because
handwriting is slower, pen and paper note-takers are not able to
transcribe the content verbatim and are forced to selectively rephrase the material; doing so helps them process and understand
the material more deeply and gain better conceptual mastery.
Other researchers have similarly found better learning outcomes
for students who took handwritten notes [13] including in actual
classroom environments [22].
The fact that taking notes by laptop can undermine conceptual
learning clearly demonstrates the importance of understanding
the cognitive underpinnings of note-taking when developing notetaking technologies: features designed to make note taking easier
can actually lead to inferior outcomes [23,24]. The goal of new
classroom note-taking technologies should be to reduce extraneous cognitive load while preserving helpful cognitive
processing.
Indeed, counterintuitively, manipulating the programs used for
digital note-taking to slow note-taking speed could help circumvent the natural tendency to take verbatim notes when using a
laptop and induce students to engage in deeper processing. An
analogous intervention in an online note-taking program was
successful; a text-editing program that did not allow cutting and
pasting of notes was shown to lead to better long-term retention
of information than a program that allowed students to copy-paste
chunks of text [23]. Providing a structured tool for typing notes on
a computer, such as a matrix chart organizer, has also been shown
to improve performance on assessments [24].
One of the biggest issues with digital technology in the
classroom continues to be the potential for distraction that
laptops provide (For a general review of some of the detriments
of technology in the classroom, see Spitzer [25]). Recent studies
have found that students may spend as little as one-third of
classroom time taking notes, while the other two-thirds are
spent on social media and other non-class distractions [26,27].
Using the internet for non-academic purposes negatively
impacts exam performance regardless of students’ baseline
intellectual ability [28].
Off-topic multitasking in class may not be detrimental to the
multitasker alone. In one experiment, students seated so that their
line of sight included two multitasking students scored 17% lower
on a comprehension test than students who saw two on-task
note-takers [29]. While a study on “laptop zoning” (separating the
laptop from the longhand note-takers by seating section) found
that the zones did not impact student performance, laptop notetakers did perform significantly worse on the exam than their
previous statistics and demographics would have predicted, while
pen-and-paper note-takers did significantly better [13].
As tablets become more prominent, distraction may decrease;
one study reports significantly less time spent on various off-topic
websites during class when using an iPad than when using a
laptop [30]. However, a question that commonly arises regarding
tablets is whether tablet-and-stylus is sufficiently similar to penand-paper note-taking so as to provide the same advantages.
While there has not been a completely controlled experimental
comparison, Kalnikaite & Whittaker [31] experimentally investigated differences in memory for people taking notes with pen
and paper, taking notes with a tablet and stylus that also recorded
speech, and not taking notes at all. Both note-taking conditions
outperformed the no-notes condition, and there were no differences between performance in the two note-taking conditions one
141
and seven days later. Thirty days later, participants in the tablet
condition performed best, but the researchers attributed that to
their ability to access the underlying speech content. The researchers found that the notes taken with pen and paper and
stylus and tablet were substantially alike, and did not differ in
quantity, quality, or form. Other researchers reported similar
findings regarding the content of stylus/tablet and pen/paper
notes, but also noted that students felt that the interface of the
tablets and PDAs was not as convenient or comfortable as plain
pen and paper [32].
One final factor to consider regarding note-taking modality is
the possibility of interventions on the instructor side. Huxham [33]
demonstrated that the use of an “interactive window”—the use of
a short problem to be discussed between small groups of students
for three to five minutes—led to significantly higher note quality
than a general class discussion on a topic.2 A simpler change that
also improved the quality of student notes was the implementation of short lecture breaks in which students could consolidate
and revise their notes [34].3 Moreover, as more assessments move
onto the computer, issues related to context-dependent learning
[35] may arise. Barrett et al. [36] reported that congruent modalities for note-taking and assessment led to higher scores than
incongruence in note-taking and assessment.
As stated above, in classroom settings, the primary goal of note
taking is to facilitate learning. However, there is little evidence
that digital note taking technology has been effective at promoting
learning, and there is significant evidence that it can impede
learning. This is largely due to two factors: (i) many digital technologies afford opportunities for distraction and (ii) current
technologies typically facilitate the production of external storage
rather than the content processing that note-taking can engender.
At this point, tablet/stylus systems and smart pens (e.g., LiveScribe) may be the best technology for the classroom, allowing for
longhand note-taking, minimizing the distraction of email/Internet, and providing students with an electronic record of the notes
taken.
However, outside of the classroom, the goals of note-taking are
often different, and thus require different types of technological
tools to be effective.
While there has been less research examining factors influencing the effectiveness of note-taking outside of educational settings, a review of the goals and note-taking practices in different
areas shows that our framework of examining aims and cognitive
requirements for achieving those aims can give useful insights into
how note-taking technology should be developed.
3. Boardroom
While it is of course true that some of the classroom findings
(e.g., the distractive capabilities of laptops) are relevant to the
business world, note-taking raises distinct issues in the workplace
as well (see Hartley [37] for a review of note-taking in nonacademic settings).
While the data are sparser than for students, workers seem to
be equally ambivalent about whether to use pen and paper or tech
devices for note-taking. The single most common place to take
2
Because “quality” is a nebulous term, we provide the authors’ operationalizations here. Quality of notes was assessed for each of the 4 topics by two
independent raters on the following scale: 0 (not present in the notes at all); 1
(some notes, but incomplete or involving misunderstanding; 2 (full notes showing
understanding of the concept).
3
The measure of quality in this study was the number of “idea units” contained
in the notes. The lecture contained a total of 95 idea units (e.g., “A variable ratio
schedule involves rapid responding”).
142
P.A. Mueller, D.M. Oppenheimer / Trends in Neuroscience and Education 5 (2016) 139–145
notes is on the computer, but the combined instances of taking
notes on post-its or in a notebook exceed notes taken on the
computer [38]. In fact, the proportion of notes taken on computers
and phones combined is approximately equal to notes taken on
post-its and in a notebook.
In the business world, note-taking is most likely to take place in
meetings. One ethnographic field study reported that 63% of the
workers in the sample always took their own meeting notes, and
75% did so at least frequently. However, workers felt that they
faced a tradeoff between taking notes and participating in the
discussion. The data bore this out; those workers who took detailed notes contributed the least to the conversation [39]. However, another study found that workers tended to take frequent,
short notes during meetings, and that the quantity of notes was
positively correlated with the amount of spoken words during the
meeting [40]. Both studies reported that individuals’ note-taking
strategies were idiosyncratic. The inconsistencies in the results
and the differences between individuals’ note-taking strategies
may be due to the competing goals facing workers during meetings. These include keeping a relatively complete record for oneself or for others unable to attend the meeting, and also actively
providing input and participating in the discussion – two cognitively demanding tasks that may interfere with one another. Notetaking at the expense of participation is problematic because high
levels of group participation in decision making are necessary for
creative problem solving and innovation [41].
As an expert witness, a well-known note-taking researcher
opined that workplace notes likely “omit most of what was said,
omit details, context, and essential qualifiers, and contain inaccurate or vague statements” [42]. Workplace notes are likely to
be less complete than lecture notes, because workplace presentations nearly always involve some visual content [43], and
slides are also often provided in advance [44], both of which reduce note quantity. While some prior work, e.g., Kiewra et al. [45],
suggests that more content will be written down in a small group
or face-to-face setting, more ecologically valid research suggests
the opposite; far fewer notes tend to be taken in small group
meetings [39,40,46].
While much of the research on note-taking in the workplace
involves meetings, there is also a literature on note-taking during
job interviews. Note-taking in this context is used to create a record of the conversation and provide information for use in subsequent hiring (and promotion) decisions. Generally, interviewers
have information about candidates prior to beginning the interview, leading to expectancy bias in their evaluations. The evidence
is mixed, but note-taking in an interview may reduce the effects of
bias [47,48]. However, other research suggests that while notetaking in interviews may improve recall of information about
candidates, it does not improve accuracy in evaluation of the
candidates [49]. Burnett et al. [50] suggest that the impact of notes
in the interview setting may depend on their content: notes that
focus on a candidate's job performance (e.g., sticks to a task, sets
high goals) leads to more valid ratings than notes that focus on the
candidate's interview performance (e.g., eye contact, seems nervous). Thus, while it is not entirely clear how, and to what extent,
note-taking improves final decision making in the hiring process,
note-taking tools that help people focus on more valuable information (as opposed to maximizing the amount of information
recorded) could be particularly effective.
Workplace note-taking is generally used to memorialize conversations and refresh one's own or someone else's memory about
their content, rather than as a tool for learning. In contrast to the
classroom, the goals of workplace note-taking may be better
served by using a laptop or tablet. Typing notes is not as taxing on
working memory as handwriting notes, leaving more cognitive
capacity for workers to participate in discussions during meetings.
It also provides a more complete record for later review, benefiting
others who were unable to attend the meeting.. Having this more
complete record may also reduce bias in hiring, although in hiring
the nature of the notes taken may ultimately be more important
than the quantity. A more definite recommendation for workplace
interview note-taking will require significantly more research in
this domain.
4. Hospital room
Therapists, counselors, and doctors generally take notes in oneon-one encounters, which may form a part of a patient's long-term
file. Doctors and students face similar competing considerations in
terms of the goals of their note-taking. Doctors’ and therapists’
goals are to help understand a patient's issues and make clinical
decisions – similar to students’ goals to understand the lecture
content – but they also must create a record for future sessions to
build on (more akin to the external storage goal). Doctors and
counselors may also feel compelled to create a more complete
record than most note-takers in case of future malpractice claims.
However, doctors and therapists face one critical challenge that
students do not: they must be able to take notes without damaging the rapport between counselor and patient.
The research on note-taking in clinical settings is mixed and
inconclusive. Some studies suggest note-taking may improve
therapist performance by helping therapists remember patient
information and reducing the impact of any biases that therapists
may hold [37]. However, other work has not found note-taking to
enhance recall or improve clinical judgment [51].
The extent to which note-taking upsets the patient-therapist
dynamic is equally inconclusive. For example, when social work
graduate students viewed videos of simulated therapeutic interviews, they perceived therapists who took notes throughout the
session as less effective than those who did not [52]. They also
believed that the client in a session with a note-taking therapist
viewed the session more negatively (less rapport, less comfort,
etc.). Other studies have failed to find a difference. For example,
Christie, Bemister, & Dobson [53] created therapy videos in which
the therapist either took occasional notes (8 times during a
9-minute video) or took no notes. Participants’ competency ratings
of therapists who took notes did not differ from ratings of therapists who did not take notes. Still other studies show mixed results. For example, Miller [54] found no difference in perceived
expertise or trustworthiness between note-taking and non-notetaking counselors, but did find that participants were more willing
to visit a counselor who did not take notes than one who did.
Introducing technology into therapeutic note taking does little
to resolve the inconclusive nature of the literature. Rasminsky
et al. [55] note the difficulty of integrating digital note-taking into
psychiatry practice, since paying attention to the patient's affect,
body language, and appearance is critical. However, a recent set of
studies assigned patients to therapists taking notes with either
pen and paper, iPad and stylus, or computer, and found no significant differences in patient ratings of the counselors [56].
With regard to physical examinations and other medical doctors’ appointments, an older study on physician note-taking found
no significant differences in patient satisfaction based on whether
the doctor took pen-and-paper or computer notes [57]. However, a
more recent (and far larger) study suggests patients seeing lessexperienced physicians (medical residents in their first few years
out of school) were more likely to agree that the computer made
the visit feel less personal than those seeing more seasoned doctors [58].
Given the mixed evidence, it seems that note taking can impair
patient-clinician relationships, but does not necessarily do so.
P.A. Mueller, D.M. Oppenheimer / Trends in Neuroscience and Education 5 (2016) 139–145
While the data is not conclusive, some researchers have suggested
that when note-taking does undermine rapport, it is a result of
how note-taking affects attentive non-verbal behaviors of the
counselor [54]. Thus, it is particularly important that note taking
technologies developed for medical settings are designed with the
awareness of how using them might disrupt conversational
mannerisms (such as eye-contact, non-verbal mimicry, or
gestures).
The note-taking technology that would be most beneficial to
workers in therapeutic fields would involve a less-intrusive device
(e.g., tablet as opposed to laptop or desktop computer) to minimize the barrier between patient and counselor or physician. Tablet-and-stylus technology with effective OCR (optical character
recognition) to transform handwriting into typed notes may be the
best way to balance the two goals of workers in this field. The
stylus would allow for relatively natural input while enabling
continued interaction with a patient. Having a clean, typed record
of notes, which could be compiled after each appointment, would
be more useful as a subsequent reference.
5. Courtroom
In the legal setting, note-taking comes in two main forms: juror
note-taking and documenting witness interviews. Despite being
discussed for over a century, juror note-taking is still an unsettled
issue. Currently, note-taking is allowed on a state-by-state basis;
one estimate suggests that jurors were allowed to take notes in
71.2% of state civil trials and 73.5% of federal civil trials, while the
percentages were somewhat lower for criminal trials [59]. These
figures mask the differences across states; while a few states have
made it mandatory to allow note-taking, in other states, judges’
case-by-case decisions have disallowed note-taking in the majority of cases.
Proponents of courtroom note-taking have argued that allowing jurors to take notes increases their recall of case facts and leads
to better verdicts [60,61]. Additionally, there is some evidence that
jurors are more satisfied with the justice system if they are allowed to take notes [62–64]. Juror satisfaction is important because, for many, jury duty is their first (and perhaps only) contact
with the legal system. A juror's satisfaction or dissatisfaction can
affect their support of and compliance with the legal system in
general, and may affect the attitudes of others in their social
network [65–67].
Opponents of juror note-taking have argued that juror notes
can have undue influence during deliberations and may reflect the
biases of the note-taker [68,69]. (e.g., Fischer v. Fischer, 1966;
United States v. Darden et al., 1995). Penrod & Heuer [70], reporting
on their prior field studies, argue that the weight of the experimental evidence suggests that these worries are unfounded.
However, it is an open question whether any of these effects
would be different if notes were taken with a digital device.
There are many studies, both in the lab and in the field, investigating the effects of juror note-taking; for overviews, see
[70,71]. In general, while these studies vary in their chosen measures, they find note-taking to be useful. Two papers are worth
mentioning for their noteworthy findings. ForsterLee, Horowitz, &
Bourgeois [72] cleanly distinguish the encoding and external storage effects of juror notes, and show that the impact is at the
encoding stage – the differences between jurors who had access to
their notes at deliberation and those who did not were minimal.
Horowitz & Bordens [73] took a different approach from most
other papers, and investigated jury outcomes, rather than just
juror recall. Overall, mock civil juries (6 members) who were not
allowed to take notes awarded higher compensatory and punitive
damages than those who did take notes. However, there was also a
143
significant interaction with cognitive load. Under high cognitive
load (a more complex case), juries that took notes awarded less in
compensation, but under low cognitive load, juries whose members took notes actually awarded more in compensation [73]. In
this study, jurors did not have access to their notes during
deliberation.
“Technological” innovations include the trial-ordered notebook
(TON) created by Hope et al. [74]. The TON contains headings that
outline the course of trial, and subheadings for jurors to make
specific notes on the evidence, arguments, and rebuttals of both
prosecution and defense. Hope et al. found jurors who used the
TON noted more legally relevant details during the trial and had a
more complete, but not more accurate, recall of trial information
during a subsequent cued-recall test. Other researchers have found
that the TON led to both more complete and more accurate recording of facts [75]. They did not find a difference between
“freestyle” note-takers and TON note-takers on verdict accuracy.
In terms of digital technology in the courtroom, it is unlikely
that jurors will be allowed to take notes on a tablet or laptop
anytime soon. Smartphones, tablets, and laptops are banned in
many federal courtrooms as a result of the federal rule against
broadcasting of proceedings [76], though some judges have begun
to allow tweeting by journalists during civil trials [77]. Judges have
also expressed concern that the sound of typing on a laptop would
be disruptive [78]. Even in states with permissive rules regarding
laptops in the courtroom, worries about distraction and publicity
would likely keep them out of the hands of jurors. In any case,
given the issues described above with regard to verbatim notetaking when typing, it is not clear that we would want jurors to
make the switch from paper to screen.
It is possible that some tablet-and-stylus technology could be
developed that would help jurors structure their notes (akin to the
TON), but at this point, research suggests that tablet notes and
pen-and-paper notes are equivalent [31]. If this is true, the logistical difficulties created would outweigh the potential benefits.
The biggest hurdle is that courts would have to provide the devices for the jurors. This is for two reasons: first, to make sure
there is nothing inappropriate or distracting on the machine (e.g.,
games, internet access), and second, because juror notes are
usually collected at lunch and at the end of the day. Jurors are
generally not allowed to take their notes home with them and are
unlikely to be willing to surrender their personal tablets or laptops
to the court for the duration of trial.
While much of the discussion of note-taking in the legal setting
has focused on jurors, there is also a smaller literature on notes of
witness interviews. Though this is changing, currently, not all
witness interviews are recorded; therefore, investigators’ accurate
representation of what a witness said is critical. Hyman Gregory
[79] found that those who took notes during investigative interviews included more information and had a greater percentage of
accurate information in their post-interview report (written two
weeks after the interview). While taking notes is better than not,
other research reminds us that notes are necessarily incomplete;
in one study, 25% of incident-relevant details were not recorded in
interviewers’ notes [80]. Recording these interactions is critical to
preserving the initial recollections of witnesses, unfiltered by
someone else's selective notes. No work has been done on technological innovations in witness interviewing, but it seems that
the tablet programs that allow for speech recording and simultaneous annotation would be extremely useful in this context.
6. Conclusion
Inside the classroom, learning is paramount, and there is good
evidence suggesting how technology should and should not be
144
P.A. Mueller, D.M. Oppenheimer / Trends in Neuroscience and Education 5 (2016) 139–145
used in order to support this goal. However, outside the classroom,
note taking is used in many varied situations. In business meetings, note takers are often tasked with keeping a relatively complete record to share with others, while also maintaining an active
discussion. Doctors and therapists must take accurate and relatively comprehensive notes while still maintaining patient rapport.
Jurors and police must take accurate notes, above all else, and the
process should keep people engaged and satisfied with the legal
system. The trend in digital note-taking innovations is to tout how
an application or device “makes note-taking easy,” but in most of
these situations, making note-taking easier is not the solution.
Making note-taking easier may actually lead to ironic negative
consequences. For instance, making the note-taking process too
easy can undermine learning; “desirable difficulties,” such as
slower note-taking, have been shown to improve educational
outcomes [81–83]. Making note-taking easier also encourages
people to take more notes; this, in turn, can impair patient rapport
in the clinical setting, or undermine participation in workplace
meetings.
As note-taking technology continues to evolve, developers
should consider how a new device or application could make notetaking more effective, not just easier. In order to do this, they need
to understand the differing goals of taking notes in various settings. The developers can then consider interventions that encourage the cognitive processes that serve each goal. For instance,
applications created for learning environments should encourage
selectivity and deeper processing. Applications for doctors and
counselors should require minimal interaction with the screen to
encourage increased nonverbal communication with patients.
Starting with the goal of effectiveness in a given context, rather
than ease of use across the board, will hopefully lead to new
technologies that improve note-taking experiences and outcomes
for all users.
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