Does handwriting notes really beat typing them? (Mueller & Oppenheimer vs Morehead et al.)

Contested. The original "pen beats keyboard" study did NOT reliably replicate — the deeper lesson (paraphrase, don't transcribe) survives, but "handwriting beats typing" itself is not robust.

Mueller & Oppenheimer (2014), "The pen is mightier than the keyboard," reported that longhand note-takers outperformed laptop users on conceptual questions — the proposed reason being that typing lets you transcribe verbatim, while writing by hand is slower and forces paraphrasing.

But a large registered replication by Morehead, Dunlosky & Rawson (2019) found performance did not consistently differ between the groups, and mini meta-analyses found small, non-significant effects. Verdict: don't rely on "handwriting is better." Rely on the mechanism that does hold — process and paraphrase rather than transcribe — regardless of your tool. (Separately, laptop distraction/multitasking does reliably harm learning.)