上海美国梦沃课程中心报道 笔记本电脑在世界各地的课堂上都随处可见。图为2014年10月13日，学生们在在位于德国缅因州法兰克福的约翰·沃尔夫冈·歌德大学听课。

　　Laptops are common in lecture halls worldwide. Students hear a lecture at the Johann Wolfang Goethe-University on Oct. 13 2014 in Frankfurt am Main Germany.

　　随着笔记本电脑变得越来越普及，体积的越来越小巧，还有各种各样平板电脑的问世，使手写对于当今的学生来说仿佛十分过时。打字记录的速度的确很快，可以更方便地记录下大量信息，但是用“落伍”的手写依旧有许多的优势和优点。

　　有一件事可以确认，那就是用电脑或者平板会让你有分心的倾向，你随时可以打开你的Facebook。实际证明，长远来看用慢慢地手写是更有用，有效率的方法。

　　As laptops become smaller and more ubiquitous and with the advent of tablets the idea of taking notes by hand just seems old-fashioned to many students today. Typing your notes is faster — which comes in handy when there's a lot of information to take down. But it turns out there are still advantages to doing things the old-fashioned way.For one thing research shows that laptops and tablets have a tendency to be distracting — it's so easy to click over to Facebook in that dull lecture. And a study has shown that the fact that you have to be slower when you take notes by hand is what makes it more useful in the long run.

　　普林斯顿大学的帕姆A. 米勒和加利福尼亚大学的丹尼尔M. 奥本海默 发布了来自心理科学的研究，关于手写笔记和用电脑笔记对学校的影响。

　　“当人们用打字的方式记录下他们想写的东西时，他们会想要写下得越多越好。” 米勒是这样告诉国家公共电台的马丁的。 “用普通书写作业的同学会被迫地在文章的表达上更讲究，因为他们不能像打字那样写得那么快。那些多出时间所做的过程是对他们有益的。”

　　In the study published in Psychological Science Pam A. Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the University of California Los Angeles sought to test how note taking by hand or by computer affects learning."When people type their notes they have this tendency to try to take verbatim notes and write down as much of the lecture as they can" Mueller tells NPR's Rachel Martin. "The students who were taking longhand notes in our studies were forced to be more selective — because you can't write as fast as you can type. And that extra processing of the material that they were doing benefited them."

　　米勒和奥本海默认为记笔记可以被分成两种方式：产出型和非产出型。产出型笔记就是有“总结，释义和概念映射” ，而非产出型笔记就是逐字地复制一些东西。有两个关于为什么产出型笔记是更好的选择的臆测。第一个假设叫做编码记忆，意思是说，当一个人在做笔记的时候，重复的过程会提高学习水平和记忆力。第二个假设叫做外部储存记忆，是说你可以从你之前所写的内容有所收获，甚至是从别人的笔记中有所学成。

　　Mueller and Oppenheimer cited that notetaking can be categorized two ways: generative and nogenerative. Generative notetaking pertains to "summarizing paraphrasing concept mapping" while nongenerative notetaking involves copying something verbatim.And there are two hypotheses to why notetaking is beneficial in the first place. The first idea is called the encoding hypothesis which says that when a person is taking notes "the processing that occurs" will improve "learning and retention." The second called the external-storage hypothesis is that you learn by being able to look back at your notes or even the notes of other people.

　　因为人们打字可以比手写快得多，用电脑打字会让人们更倾向于试着把他们所听到的所有东西都抄写下来。在这方面，米勒和奥本海默面临的问题就是，不论你写得特别完整是不是更有优势，在电脑上做抄写比没有过程地获得信息的缺点更重要。另一方面，当你普通书写时，写内容的过程胜过偶尔回顾之前的内容。

　　Because people can type faster than they write using a laptop will make people more likely to try to transcribe everything they're hearing. So on the one hand Mueller and Oppenheimer were faced with the question of whether the benefits of being able to look at your more complete transcribed notes on a laptop outweighs the drawbacks of not processing that information. On the other hand when writing longhand you process the information better but have less to look back at.

　　第一个研究中，他们找了一些大学生(心理学中的小白鼠)，给他们看TED 的各种讲座。他们发现，用电脑记笔记的同学们写的内容量远胜于用手写记笔记的同学们。当测试学生们对于讲座内容的记忆时，研究人员发现了这些问题的分歧的关键点。让同学们回忆一些实际内容时，比如说时间，两组同学做得同样好。但是对于一些概念上的问题，比如“日本和瑞典在处理他们同样的社会问题上做法有什么不一样?”，用电脑做笔记的学生回答得十分糟糕。

　　For their first study they took university students (the standard guinea pig of psychology) and showed them TED talks about various topics. Afterward they found that the students who used laptops wrote significantly more words than those who took notes by hand. When testing how well the students remembered information the researchers found a key point of divergence in the type of question. For questions that asked students to simply remember facts like dates both groups did equally well. But for "conceptual-application" questions such as "How do Japan and Sweden differ in their approaches to equality within their societies?" the laptop users did "significantly worse."

　　在第二次研究中发生了同样的结果，他们还特地告诉用电脑打字的同学避免逐字写下所有所听到的东西。“即使我们对学生强调过打字时不要逐字记录内容，他们也无法克制打字时的本能”米勒说。学生打字的笔记做得越详细，他们在测试中表现得越差。

　　The same thing happened in the second study even when they specifically told students using laptops to try to avoid writing things down verbatim. "Even when we told people they shouldn't be taking these verbatim notes they were not able to overcome that instinct" Mueller says. The more words the students copied verbatim the worse they performed on recall tests.

　　为了测试外部储存记忆假设，第三次研究时，他们给学生在测试时浏览之前笔记的机会。他们想，如果学生有足够时间去学习他们所打字记录下来的笔记，也许结果会是写了更完整内容的打字派学生会比手写派学生更出色。但是用手写的同学依旧表现得十分好，“这暗示的证明了手写时的外部储存记忆和编码记忆一样好。”米勒和奥本海默写道。

　　And to test the external-storage hypothesis for the third study they gave students the opportunity to review their notes in between the lecture and test. The thinking is if students have time to study their notes from their laptops the fact that they wrote down more extensive notes than their longhand-writing peers could possibly help them perform better.But the students taking notes by hand still performed better. "This is suggestive evidence that longhand notes may have superior external storage as well as superior encoding functions" Mueller and Oppenheimer write.

　　明智的大学生们会因为这样的研究结果重新拾起纸质笔记本吗?

　　Do studies like these mean wise college students will start migrating back to notebooks?

　　“我认为这会是一次非常困难的推销，去让人们重新拿起纸和笔。”米勒说，“但是现在有了更多的科技电子产品的发展，记录仪，电子笔和平板的科技越来越发达。我相信这会在某种程度上更容易地影响大学生和他们这一代人。”

　　"I think it is a hard sell to get people to go back to pen and paper" Mueller says. "But they are developing lots of technologies now like Livescribe and various stylus and tablet technologies that are getting better and better. And I think that will be sort of an easier sell to college students and people of that generation."