A famous study said yes, but a large replication failed to reproduce the advantage.
What the evidence shows
Mueller & Oppenheimer (2014), in a paper titled 'The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard,' reported that students who took notes by hand understood lecture material better than laptop typists, supposedly because handwriting is slower and forces you to summarise rather than transcribe verbatim.
A large pre-registered replication and extension (Morehead et al., 2019) failed to reproduce the handwriting advantage on comprehension, and other reviews find the evidence weak and inconsistent. The underlying idea — that processing and summarising beats mindless transcription — is reasonable, but the specific 'always handwrite' conclusion is contested. What matters is how actively you engage with the material, not the tool; a distraction-free laptop used thoughtfully can work as well as a pen.
Sources
Mueller, P. A., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking.
Psychological Science, 25(6), 1159–1168
Handwritten note-takers outperformed laptop typists on conceptual questions, attributed to more summarising and less verbatim copying.
DOI: 10.1177/0956797614524581 →Morehead, K., Dunlosky, J., & Rawson, K. A. (2019). How much mightier is the pen than the keyboard for note-taking? A replication and extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014).
Educational Psychology Review, 31, 753–780
A pre-registered replication did not reproduce the handwriting advantage in comprehension or retention.
DOI: 10.1007/s10648-019-09468-2 →