Qualitative differences between longhand and laptop notes: Leximancer

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While the results were inconsistent with findings from Mueller and

Oppenheimer’s (2014) listening note-taking research that participants who took more notes were reported to perform better, they replicate Horwitz’s (2017) results under reading condition that the correlations between word count and test performance were not significant. Earlier research investigating longhand note-taking during lecture condition had similar findings (Chaudron, Loschky, & Cook, 1994; Hsieh, 2006).

Both studies concluded that the total of words participants produced during note-taking could not predict their test performance.

4.2.2 Qualitative differences between longhand and laptop notes:

Leximancer content analysis.

While there were no significant differences in the word numbers and in their effect on post-reading comprehension performance, Leximancer, a concept mapping algorithm that can discover co-occurrence information, has presented quite different concept maps for the two kinds of notes comparing to the concept map of original study. Below, the data analysis results of the original study text, longhand notes and laptop notes will be displayed. In this section, the Themes and their co-occurring Concepts of the study will first be presented, and the results from the laptop notes and longhand notes will then be listed and compared.

4.2.2.1 Results of Themes from different materials.

Figure 4 shows the results of the original study Parents and Children in

Supermarkets: Incidence and Influence (Page, Sharp, Lockshin & Sorensen, 2018).

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Noted that Theme circles are merely boundaries. The size of the circles does not indicate the importance or prevalence of a Theme. Moreover, according to the Leximancer User Guide (Leximancer Pty Ltd., 2013):

The size of a concept’s dot reflects its connectivity in the concept map. In other words, the larger the concept dot, the more often the concept is coded in the text along with the other concepts in the map. Connectivity in this sense is the sum of all the text co-occurrence counts of the concept with every other concept on the map.

In the map in Figure 4, the major eight Themes include children, shoppers, store, shopping, accompanied, in-store, number and wider. These are the prominent

concepts discussed in the study.

Figure 4. Leximancer map: Theme circles of the study text.

Laptop notes from different note-takers were assembled into a single Microsoft Word file and then underwent the operation of Leximancer. Themes of the laptop

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notes are presented in Figure 5. The eight major are as follows: children, time, store, shoppers, in-store, requests, kids and survey.

Figure 5. Leximancer map: Theme circles of the laptop notes.

Finally, longhand notes that were transformed into digital form were assembled into one Microsoft Word file and underwent Leximancer analysis. Figure 6 shows the five major Themes of longhand notes: time, children, behavior, areas and space.

Figure 6. Leximancer map: Theme circles of the longhand notes.

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At first glance, the map of the original text and the map of the laptop notes share more similarity as they both contain eight Themes when the theme sizes are set at 45%. In contrast, there are only five themes in the map of longhand notes. Also, original text and laptop notes share up to four identical concepts, children, store, shoppers and in-store, while the longhand notes Themes only include one identical concept, children, comparing to the original text.

Since the notes were taken during reading rather than after reading, the higher degrees of similarities between laptop notes and original texts may result from more acts of copying and typing exacts words by laptop note-takers. Therefore, it can be concluded that more verbatim notes were taken during laptop note-taking compared to longhand note-taking.

Figure 7. Leximancer map: Concepts of the study text.

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4.2.2.2 Results of concepts from different materials.

Figure 7 shows the top-ranked Concepts of the Leximancer results from the original text. In the order of ranking, the top ten Concepts are children, shoppers, store, shopping, accompanied, research, trip, behavior, present, spend and etc., i.e., they are the keywords that travel together more in the study text.

Top-ranked Concepts of the laptop notes are presented in Figure 8. The top-ten Concepts are sequentially children, store, shopping, time, shoppers, spend, size, behavior, influence, and products. Comparing the top ten concepts of laptop notes and the original text, six of them are the same concepts: children, shoppers, store,

shopping, behavior and spend. Furthermore, when narrowed down to the top-five concepts, four out of five concepts of the laptop notes resemble those of the original text: children, shoppers, store and shopping.

Figure 8. Leximancer map: Concepts of the laptop notes.

On the other hand, according to Figure 9, the top-ten concepts of the longhand notes contain time, children, shopping, size, grocery, faster, navigation, maps, density

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and in-store. Comparing the results of the original text and the longhand notes, only two out of the top-ten concepts are the same: children and shopping.

Figure 9. Leximancer map: Concepts of the longhand notes.

The observation of the Concepts has shown that the similarity between the results of the original text and the laptop notes are higher (sex identical concepts out of ten), compared to the results between the original text and the longhand notes (two out of ten).

In sum, it could be concluded that from both macro level (Theme) or micro level (Concept) observation, compared to longhand notes, the results of laptop notes shared more similarities with those of the original text. The findings in relation to the higher similarity could inferred that more verbatim notes were taken by laptop note-takers, i.e. they tended to copy and type in the exact words from the original text rather than putting the important points into their own words.

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