Studying on paper vs screen: should you print your lecture slides?

If you're wondering whether studying on paper vs screen makes a difference, the short answer is that it depends on what you're doing. For careful reading of a long, dense text, paper tends to have a small edge. For searching, listening to an explanation, quizzing yourself or reviewing flashcards, the screen wins. And what matters most isn't the medium at all: it's what you do with the material.

With lecture slides, the question gets more concrete. Printing every deck just in case is expensive and rarely gets used. Printing the slides for the topics you struggle with, with room to write next to them, can actually change how you study.

For years I printed entire decks that ended up in a binder I never opened. Then I swung the other way and studied everything on my laptop with twenty tabs open. Here's what I figured out somewhere in between.

What the research says about paper and screens

There's a fair amount of research on reading on paper versus on screens, and the reviews that pool lots of studies land in a similar place: for informational texts like a textbook chapter or course notes, comprehension tends to be slightly better on paper. The gap is small, and it grows under time pressure or with longer texts.

The most common explanation isn't about the screen itself but about how we read on it. On a laptop we tend to read faster, skim, feel more confident than we should about what we understood, and every notification is one click away. Paper doesn't do anything magical. It just slows us down.

You've probably also seen the famous study claiming that taking notes by hand beats typing them. It's worth knowing that later replications didn't find such a clear difference. What does hold up is the idea behind it: copying down every word barely helps, and summarizing in your own words helps a lot, whether you're holding a pen or typing.

When paper is the better choice

Paper shines when slow, focused attention matters:

• Topics that aren't clicking. A supply and demand graph from your Microeconomics lecture that makes no sense is easier to work through printed out, pencil in hand, labeling each axis and sketching what happens when a curve shifts.
• Writing on it. Arrows, questions in the margin, links between one slide and another. On paper it's instant; on a screen, even with a stylus, it depends on the app.
• Seeing several at once. Six slides spread across a desk show you the shape of the whole lecture at a glance, which is hard to get on a screen.
• Getting away from distractions. If your problem is opening a new tab every five minutes, paper takes the temptation away.

If you do print, print smart: several slides per page (the three-slides-with-lines handout layout is built into most presentation apps), black and white unless the colors carry meaning, and only the topics where you'll actually write something.

When the screen is the better choice

Screens win at everything paper can't do:

• Search. Finding which lecture a concept showed up in, inside an eighty-slide PDF, takes a second.
• Listening and watching. The lecture recording, a video on the topic, a spoken explanation of each slide. None of that exists on paper.
• Testing yourself. Spaced repetition flashcards, quizzes and practice questions work better in an app that keeps track of what you missed.
• Having everything in one place. The slides, your notes, the textbook and past exams, without hauling a binder around.
• Slides that change. If your professor posts a corrected deck the week of the midterm, the printed one is already out of date.

One practical tip: if you study on a laptop, close everything else. Full screen, notifications off, phone in another room. The screen's weakness is mostly what surrounds it.

It's not paper or screen, it's what you do with it

The medium debate hides something more important. Rereading a printed, highlighted slide three times gets you about as far as rereading it on a screen three times: not very far. As I wrote in does rereading work, what makes material stick is retrieving it without looking, explaining it in your own words and coming back to it days later.

So the useful question isn't "should I print this?" but "what am I going to do with it?" If the answer is read and highlight, it doesn't matter where. If it's write, sketch and connect ideas, paper helps. If it's listen, search and practice, go with the screen.

How I combine the two

What's worked best for me is using each one for what it's good at, in this order:

1. Screen first, to understand. Before I study for real, I go through the whole lecture listening to an explanation. For that I use Filmina, a web app that explains your lecture slides out loud, one slide at a time, pointing at the part it's talking about. It runs in the browser, needs a connection, and if something's still unclear I ask it about that slide.
2. Then paper, to work. I print only the slides I struggled with, three per page, and write next to them what wasn't on them: the why, an example, the link to another lecture. It's the same approach as in how to take notes from slides, just on the page.
3. Screen again, to practice. Flashcards, questions, past exams. Paper doesn't help here, because what matters is answering without looking and knowing what you got wrong.

With this order I print far less than I used to, and what I print actually gets used.

If you can't or don't want to print

Printing costs money, and not everyone has a printer handy. You can get most of what's good about paper without it:

• A tablet with a stylus, if you already have one, to write right on the PDF.
• A notebook next to your laptop. The slide stays on screen and your writing goes on paper. It's the cheapest option and it works really well.
• Reader mode in your browser or PDF viewer, in full screen, to cut the clutter.
• Redraw the graph from memory on a scrap of paper, which is the most useful part of paper and doesn't need a printer.

Frequently asked questions

Is it better to study on paper or on a computer?

For careful reading of long, informational texts, paper tends to have a small comprehension edge. For searching, listening to explanations and practicing with questions, a computer is better. Technique matters more than either: recalling without looking beats rereading on any medium.

Should I print my lecture slides?

Print only the slides for the topics you find hardest, several per page with space to write. Printing every deck just in case usually ends in a binder nobody opens.

Do you learn more by writing by hand?

Writing by hand pushes you to summarize, and summarizing in your own words helps you learn. But the well-known study comparing handwriting with laptops didn't replicate as clearly, so the real point is to avoid copying word for word on any medium.

How do I stop getting distracted when studying on my laptop?

Put the slides in full screen, turn off notifications and leave your phone in another room. If it's still hard, work through the tough topics on paper and save the screen for practice.