The Knowledge Architects: Building Wisdom in the Information Age


Episode Summary

A skilled typist captures roughly 40 words per minute. A skilled handwriter sustains maybe 20. A lecturer speaks at about 150. The arithmetic of those three numbers is the entire story of note taking research, and it explains why one of the most famous findings in educational psychology turned out to be both right and wrong at the same time.

In this episode we follow nearly a century of research, from Charles Crawford's 1925 baseline to Mueller and Oppenheimer's headline grabbing 2014 paper "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard," through the multi study replication arc that quietly dismantled its causal claim. We examine the encoding versus storage framework that has organized the field since Di Vesta and Gray, the neuroscience of letter formation, the bundling logic of the Cornell system, and the surprisingly powerful drawing effect. The deeper lesson is that the medium is mostly a proxy: what determines whether note taking becomes learning is whether the act of taking the note involves real time processing or mere transcription.


Key Topics Covered

  • The arithmetic of note taking: 40 wpm typing vs. 20 wpm handwriting vs. 150 wpm lecturing
  • A century of consistent findings: Crawford (1925), Hartley and Cameron (1967), Kiewra's capture rates of 25 to 35 percent
  • The encoding versus external storage framework (Di Vesta and Gray, 1972 and 1973)
  • Kiewra's three cell taxonomy and the counterintuitive "note having" finding
  • Why review is doing most of the work: Carter and Van Matre (1975), Kiewra (1985)
  • Mueller and Oppenheimer's 2014 study and the verbatim transcription mechanism
  • The failed paraphrase intervention: instruction overridden by affordance (12.11% vs. 12.07%)
  • The replication arc: Morehead et al. (2019), Urry et al. (2021), pooled g = 0.04
  • What replicated vs. what did not: descriptive verbatim effect yes, causal learning effect no
  • The neuroscience of handwriting: James's pre literate children, Longcamp's sensorimotor traces
  • The NTNU EEG findings and the Pinet and Longcamp methodological commentary
  • The Cornell system's five Rs and why it bundles every validated mechanism on one page
  • Stylus on tablet as motor middle ground: Umejima et al. (2021) on paper vs. tablet
  • The drawing effect (Wammes, Meade, and Fernandes): roughly twice the recall rate
  • The deeper lesson: medium is a proxy for processing

Researchers Mentioned

  • Charles C. Crawford : Author of the 1925 study that established the foundational note taking finding
  • Frank Di Vesta and Susan Gray (1972, 1973) : Originators of the encoding versus external storage distinction
  • Kenneth Kiewra (University of Nebraska) : The most prolific researcher in the note taking literature; the encoding/storage taxonomy and the matrix format finding both come from his program
  • Pam Mueller (Princeton, then University of South Carolina) : Lead author of the 2014 "Pen Is Mightier" paper
  • Daniel Oppenheimer (UCLA, then Carnegie Mellon) : Co author of the 2014 paper and the verbatim transcription hypothesis
  • John Dunlosky (Kent State) : Co author of the most comprehensive review of effective learning techniques and lead replicator of Mueller and Oppenheimer
  • Kent Morehead and Katherine Rawson (Kent State) : Co authors of the 2019 replication and extension
  • Heather Urry (Tufts) : Lead author of the 2021 preregistered direct replication with mini meta analysis
  • Karin Harman James (Indiana University) : Neuroscientific anchor for the developmental letter learning literature
  • Marieke Longcamp (Aix Marseille University) : Sensorimotor traces in adult letter recognition
  • Audrey van der Meer and Ruud van der Weel (NTNU) : The handwriting EEG program at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology
  • Walter Pauk (Cornell) : Inventor of the Cornell note taking system in 1962
  • Jeffrey Wammes, Melissa Meade, and Myra Fernandes (Waterloo) : The drawing effect program

Key Studies and Sources

  • Crawford, C. C. (1925). "The correlation between lecture notes and quiz papers." Journal of Educational Psychology, 16(5), 282 to 291.
  • Di Vesta, F. J., and Gray, G. S. (1972). "Listening and note taking." Journal of Educational Psychology, 63(1), 8 to 14.
  • Carter, J. F., and Van Matre, N. H. (1975). "Note taking versus note having." Journal of Educational Psychology, 67(6), 900 to 904.
  • Kiewra, K. A., DuBois, N. F., Christian, D., McShane, A., Meyerhoffer, M., and Roskelley, D. (1991). "Note taking functions and techniques." Journal of Educational Psychology, 83(2), 240 to 245.
  • Kobayashi, K. (2005). "What limits the encoding effect of note taking? A meta analytic examination." Contemporary Educational Psychology, 30(2), 242 to 262.
  • Bui, D. C., Myerson, J., and Hale, S. (2013). "Note taking with computers: Exploring alternative strategies for improved recall." Journal of Educational Psychology, 105(2), 299 to 309.
  • Mueller, P. A., and Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). "The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking." Psychological Science, 25(6), 1159 to 1168.
  • Morehead, K., Dunlosky, J., and Rawson, K. A. (2019). "How much mightier is the pen than the keyboard for note taking?" Educational Psychology Review, 31(3), 753 to 780.
  • Urry, H. L., Crittle, C. S., Floerke, V. A., et al. (2021). "Don't ditch the laptop just yet: A direct replication of Mueller and Oppenheimer's (2014) Study 1." Psychological Science, 32(3), 326 to 339.
  • Allen, M., LeFebvre, L., LeFebvre, L., and Bourhis, J. (2020). "Is the pencil mightier than the keyboard?" Southern Communication Journal, 85(3), 143 to 154.
  • James, K. H., and Engelhardt, L. (2012). "The effects of handwriting experience on functional brain development in pre literate children." Trends in Neuroscience and Education, 1(1), 32 to 42.
  • Longcamp, M., et al. (2008). "Learning through hand or typewriting influences visual recognition of new graphic shapes." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20(5), 802 to 815.
  • Askvik, E. O., van der Weel, F. R., and van der Meer, A. L. H. (2020). "The importance of cursive handwriting over typewriting for learning in the classroom." Frontiers in Psychology, 11:1810.
  • Umejima, K., Ibaraki, T., Yamazaki, T., and Sakai, K. L. (2021). "Paper notebooks vs. mobile devices: Brain activation differences during memory retrieval." Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 15:634158.
  • Wammes, J. D., Meade, M. E., and Fernandes, M. A. (2016). "The drawing effect: Evidence for reliable and robust memory benefits in free recall." Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69(9), 1752 to 1776.
  • Pauk, W. (1962). How to Study in College (1st ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Key Numbers to Remember

  • 150 words per minute : the speed at which a typical lecturer speaks
  • 20 to 22 words per minute : the speed a hand can sustain in writing
  • 40 words per minute : the speed of a skilled typist
  • 25 to 35 percent : Kiewra's estimate of important lecture ideas a student typically captures
  • 40 percent : Hartley and Cameron's (1967) figure for important points captured
  • 14.6 percent vs. 8.8 percent : verbatim overlap with the lecture, laptop vs. longhand (Mueller and Oppenheimer 2014)
  • 309.6 vs. 173.4 words : average note length, laptop vs. longhand
  • 12.11 percent vs. 12.07 percent (p = .97) : verbatim overlap with and without the paraphrase instruction
  • d ≈ 0.65 : the popular effect size from Mueller and Oppenheimer's Study 3 (with study opportunity)
  • g = 0.04 : the pooled effect on quiz performance across the eight study mini meta analysis (Urry et al. 2021)
  • g ≈ 0.78 to 0.91 : the robust pooled effect on word count and verbatim overlap (laptops higher)
  • d = 1.5 : left fusiform activation, free form printing greater than typing in pre literate children (James and Engelhardt 2012)
  • 2x recall rate : drawn vs. written words across seven experiments (Wammes, Meade, and Fernandes 2016)
  • 1925 : the year of Crawford's first empirical note taking study
  • 1962 : the year Walter Pauk introduced the Cornell system

Memorable Quotes

"Although more notes are beneficial, at least to a point, if the notes are taken indiscriminately or by mindlessly transcribing content, as is more likely the case on a laptop than when notes are taken longhand, the benefit disappears."
Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014, p. 1166)

"Encoding plus storage was superior to encoding and to external storage for recall performance."
Kiewra et al. (1991)

"Concluding which method is superior for improving the functions of note taking seems premature."
Morehead, Dunlosky, and Rawson (2019)

"Students and professors who are concerned about detrimental effects of computer note taking on encoding information to be learned in lectures may not need to ditch the laptop just yet."
Urry et al. (2021)

"Brain activations were significantly different between the Note and Tablet groups even if the physical layout and input methods were controlled."
Umejima et al. (2021)

"The pen is mightier than the keyboard, in the end, only when the pen is doing what the pen makes you do."

The Big Idea

For a century, note taking research has produced one stable finding: students who write things down remember more than students who do not. Everything else has been a long argument about why and how much. Mueller and Oppenheimer's 2014 paper turned that argument into a viral headline by claiming handwriting wins because keyboards invite mindless transcription. The descriptive part of their argument has held up beautifully: laptop users do produce longer, more verbatim notes. The causal part did not survive multi study replication. Across roughly a dozen samples, the pooled effect of medium on actual learning is essentially zero. The deeper finding the popular story was pointing at is real and important, just not where everyone looked: notes that are merely captured are barely encoded, and notes that are not reviewed are barely better than no notes at all. Cornell, matrix notes, and integrated drawing all win because they force summarization. The honest practical advice is not "always write by hand" but "make sure your notes are doing summarization rather than dictation, and make sure you actually return to them."


Next Episode Preview

Episode 20: Deep Reading vs. Skimming : If note taking is the output side of the format problem, reading is the input side. We look at what happens to the brain when we move from deep, sustained reading to skimming pages on a screen, and what the largest meta analysis of paper versus digital reading has actually found.

What is The Knowledge Architects: Building Wisdom in the Information Age?

The Knowledge Architects is a free, science-based podcast exploring how we learn, remember, and organize knowledge. Each episode translates peer-reviewed research from cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology into practical insights—helping you understand how your mind works and how to work with it more effectively. Brought to you by ElysFlow.