Research by Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014) compared students who typed lecture notes on laptops with those who wrote them by hand during the same time.

In terms of immediate results, laptop users typed and recorded more words during the lecture, and their notes were almost word-for-word transcripts of the lecture. The initial assumption was that this would ultimately be beneficial for these students compared with those who were handwriting their notes.

After the lectures, the two groups of students in this study were tested on the information presented. The results showed that students who wrote by hand during lectures scored significantly higher on the tests than those who typed (Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014).

The immediate question was: “Why was this the case?” Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014) found that students who handwrote their notes were consistently engaged in higher-level thinking. This meant that throughout their lectures, these students were actively listening and intellectually analyzing what to record. This led to higher knowledge-based outcomes (Luo et al., 2018; Morehead et al., 2019).

Luo et al. (2018) found that handwritten notes contained more meaningful content (such as deeper thought and greater intellectual structure), resulting in higher scores on knowledge-based tests.

Morehead et al. (2019) confirmed that the benefits of handwriting are most evident when students are assessed on higher-order conceptual understanding rather than on memorizing facts.

These studies confirm that handwriting is an essential cognitive process and a highly beneficial intellectual activity that enhances learning at advanced levels of education, that begins from the first day of school and continues thereafter.

This evidence from university classrooms illustrates a broader principle: handwriting for note‑taking is a deeper thinking skill. When students write by hand, they actively select and synthesize information.

This process requires them to decide what is essential, how ideas connect, and how best to represent them in their own words. The research indicates that this type of engagement develops, advances, and enhances critical thinking (defined as the ability to analyze, evaluate, and make reasoned, detailed judgments), because handwriting forces students to process information conceptually rather than transcribe it verbatim (Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014; Luo et al., 2018; Morehead et al., 2019).

The research also indicates that this........

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