Syntes: Voyer, Ronis & Byers (2022) — no overall difference between longhand and digital notes once distractions are removed

Källa: Voyer, D.; Ronis, S. T.; Byers, N. (2022 (Contemporary Educational Psychology 68, 102025)). The effect of notetaking method on academic performance: A systematic review and meta-analysis. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2021.102025

What the abstract says (read 2026-10-11; full text not read)

• Scope: studies of longhand versus digital notetaking "unconfounded by distractions"; 77 effect sizes, 39 samples, 36 articles; multilevel meta-analysis with robust variance estimation.
• Result: mean g = −0.008 (95 % CI −0.18 to 0.16), not different from zero.
• Moderators: significant heterogeneity; only three significant moderators: topic, learning objectives, and duration of the material.
• Authors' reading: an apparent longhand advantage in some earlier studies "can be explained at least partially by distractions from notetaking by other applications that are present only with digital devices"; more research with large representative samples of all ages is needed.
• Not verified here: whether conceptual outcomes were analysed separately, the direction of the learning-objective and duration moderators, and the outcome delays. Read the full text before using in a verdict (the nightly run has been looking for it since 2026-10-09).

Why it is in the library

It is the main meta-analysis usually cited against C7 and was missing. It pools to zero where C7's evidence (Mueller & Oppenheimer 2014; Flanigan et al. 2024, g = 0.248) finds a longhand advantage; the difference may lie in how studies with device distractions were handled.