So studies have shown that something is true that was never true for me in practice. Well, maybe I did something wrong. Those who never tried taking handwritten notes in their lives should definitely try, maybe it works for them. Or maybe they will simply enjoy it. Doesn’t hurt to try.

What we did in school and uni never required processing and summarizing anything. Teacher/lecturer would simply dictate and we had to write down anything that what explicitly preceded by “write this down”. I’d agree processing and summarizing helps with learning, but that’s totally irrelevant and doesn’t have anything to do with writing,

I disagree that writing by hand is magically improving information absorbtion/retention. Source: I’ve been doing it through all of my school and all of my uni. Being half-asleep, pondering something completely irrelevant, and in general course material flying completely over my head while I write it down was a norm most of the time. And lecturers dictating their stuff at high speeds didn’t help either. Maybe there is some temporary novelty effect after you switch from one way of writing to another, but I wouldn’t expect that last long.