Should students switch from laptops to handwritten notes to enhance their understanding and memory?

A study suggests that the answer is yes.

The problem with laptops seems to be they facilitated verbatim note-taking, so the mind is less engaged in processing what is heard and extracting material, which is what you have to do in handwriting.

In real life, as opposed to in studies, a student — at least a law student — would need to edit these typed notes down into an outline that can be studied. Even handwritten notes — which is what I had when I went to law school — must be rewritten into something much more compressed. In the study, the subjects were tested on their understanding right after they took notes. They didn't have an outlining and study period. Another difference from real life is that the subjects don't seem to have done readings before the lecture. A real student — again, I'm assuming a law student — should have carefully read the material and taken notes before class. Class notes should be adding to pre-class notes.

When I was a law student, I took class notes that were basically annotating my pre-class notes, confirming understanding developed prior to class. Then after class, I would rewrite everything as clearly and concisely as I could, producing an outline that could be studied. Handwriting may have helped, because in annotating and rewriting things, your mind is strongly engaged in an effort to boil it down. We had no computers in those days, and computers make writing and rewriting much easier, but perhaps there's too much mental ease, too much open-endedness... I say as I blog... typing out the words....

Maybe I need to start a handwritten blog... or have a handwritten blog-post of the day/week on this blog. Years ago, I had a series of posts that reproduced marginal doodles from old notes, but they were more about the drawings than the text. I've put up photos of handwritten text for one reason or another now and then. But it always seems to be about some casual charm or mystery, not for special powers of thought realized through handwriting. It's more of an art project than a writing project, and that seems to be the case when it comes to other blogs that feature handwriting.

Obviously, on the web, if you really care about the words that are written, you want the words to be searchable text, so to write a handwritten blog — unless you rewrite everything in digital text — is to choose obscurity. It's twee and introverted. Marginalia.