Syntes: Urry et al. (2021) — preregistered replication: no longhand advantage on conceptual quiz items

Källa: Urry, H. L., et al. (2021). Don't ditch the laptop just yet: A direct replication of Mueller and Oppenheimer's (2014) Study 1 plus mini meta-analyses across similar studies. Psychological Science, 32(3), 326–339. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620965541

Verified numbers (authors' 2019 PsyArXiv preprint, full text read 2026-10-07; published abstract checked)

• Design: preregistered (2017-03-07) direct replication of Mueller & Oppenheimer 2014 Study 1; N = 142 Tufts undergraduates (145 run, 3 excluded), randomly assigned to laptop or longhand notes while watching one of five TED talks; quiz after a distractor-filled delay, without studying the notes; 80 % power for d = ±0.47; equivalence bounds ±0.49.
• Conceptual items (confirmatory hypothesis: longhand > laptop): Hedges' g = −0.13 (95 % CI −0.45 to 0.20), i.e. slightly favouring laptop; significantly different from the original g = 0.34 (p = .003) and statistically equivalent to zero within ±0.49 (p = .016). Proportion correct: laptop .74, longhand .70.
• Factual items: g = −0.08 (CI −0.41 to 0.25), equivalent to zero (p = .008).
• Notes: laptop notes longer (g = −0.90) and more verbatim (g = −0.85), as in the original.
• Published abstract (2021): "laptop participants did not perform better than longhand participants on the quiz. Exploratory meta-analyses of eight similar studies echoed this pattern … results do not support the idea that longhand note taking improves immediate learning via better encoding of information." (Mini-meta numbers differ between versions — preprint k = 7 — and are not used.)
• Setting (as quoted by Oppenheimer & Ellefson 2024): sessions "on campus at various times of day outside of class … subject to distractions and errors; sessions also varied in formality and equipment".

Role for C7

Limits (weaken, 2026-10-07): a preregistered replication in the same population (university students), same instructions, conceptual outcome tested without the notes, met C7's kill-condition (typing ≥ handwriting). Not a kill: the original author argues it is a failure to generalise to distraction-prone conditions rather than a failure to replicate (Oppenheimer & Ellefson 2024), and controlled-setting meta-analyses (Allen et al. 2020, as reported there; Flanigan et al. 2024) find a longhand advantage. C7 narrowed to "not robust across settings".