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In many college classrooms, students are allowed to bring their laptops to help take down notes. Even though typing down notes might be faster than the traditional way of writing in a notebook, a new study found that writing down notes might aid in long-term conceptual comprehension.

"Our new findings suggest that even when laptops are used as intended-and not for buying things on Amazon during class-they may still be harming academic performance," psychological scientist Pam Mueller of Princeton University and the study's lead author said according to Medical Xpress.

In the first study, Mueller and researcher Daniel Oppenheimer recruited 65 college students. The students were divided into small groups to watch one of five TED Talks videos. Some of the students were given laptops that were not connected to the Internet and others were given paper and pen. They were instructed to take notes on the topic. The students then went through three distractor tasks. They also answered questions that required them to recall factual answers and conceptual ideas.

The researchers found that students from both groups were able to answer questions about facts. However, when it came to answering conceptual questions, such as "How do Japan and Sweden differ in their approaches to equality within their societies?", the pen-and-paper note takers performed better.

"It may be that longhand note takers engage in more processing than laptop note takers, thus selecting more important information to include in their notes, which enables them to study this content more efficiently," the researchers wrote.

When the researchers compared the types of notes the two groups took, they found that laptop note takers were more likely to write down words verbatim to the lesson. By writing down the exact same words that are spoken, the researches reasoned that laptop note takers were less likely process what they were learning. In the second part of the study, the researchers tested the students' recall one week later. They found that students who wrote out their notes performed better than the laptop note takers.

"I don't anticipate that we'll get a mass of people switching back to notebooks...but there are several new stylus technologies out there, and those may be the way to go to have an electronic record of one's notes, while also having the benefit of being forced to process information as it comes in, rather than mindlessly transcribing it. Mueller said. "Ultimately, the take-home message is that people should be more aware of how they are choosing to take notes, both in terms of the medium and the strategy."

The study was published in the Association for Psychological Science's journal, Psychological Science.