LogFAQs > #955262338

For Note Taking, Low-Tech Is Often Best
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/17/08/note-taking-low-tech-often-best
In college lecture halls, evidence suggests it's time to put down the laptop and pick up a pen
By: Susan Dynarski
Posted: August 21, 2017

Do computers help or hinder classroom learning in college? Step into any college lecture and youll find a sea of students with laptops and tablets open, typing as the professor speaks.
With their enhanced ability to transcribe content and look up concepts on the fly, are students learning more from lecture than they were in the days of paper and pen?
A growing body of evidence says No. When college students use computers or tablets during lecture, they learn less and earn worse grades. The evidence consists of a series of randomized trials, in both college classrooms and controlled laboratory settings.
A series of randomized trials have shown that when college students use computers or tablets during lectures, they learn less and earn worse grades.
Students who use laptops in class are likely different from those who dont. They may be more easily distracted or less interested in the course material. Alternatively, they may be the most serious (or wealthiest) students who have invested in technology to support their learning.
Randomization assures us that, on average, the students using electronics in a study are comparable at baseline to those who do not. That means that any comparison we make of students at the end of the study is caused by the treatment, which in this case is laptop use.
In a series of laboratory experiments, researchers at Princeton and the University of California, Los Angeles, had students watch a lecture, randomly assigning them either laptops or pen and paper for their note-taking. Understanding of the lecture, measured by a standardized test, was substantially worse for those who had used laptops.
Learning researchers hypothesize that, because students can type faster than they can write, a lecturers words flow straight from the students ears through their typing fingers, without stopping in the brain for substantive processing. Students writing by hand, by contrast, have to process and condense the material if their pens are to keep up with the lecture. Indeed, in this experiment, the notes of the laptop users more closely resembled transcripts than summaries of the lectures.
Taking notes can serve two learning functions: the physical storage of content (ideally, for later review) and the cognitive encoding of that content. These lab experiments suggest that laptops improve storage, but undermine encoding. On net, those who use laptops do worse, with any benefit of better storage swamped by worse encoding.
We could try to teach students to use their laptops better, nudging them to think about the material as they type. The researchers tried this in a second experiment, advising the laptop users that summarizing and condensing leads to more learning than transcription. This instruction had no effect on the results.
Students using laptops can also distract their classmates from their learning, another lab experiment suggests. Researchers at York and McMaster recruited students to watch a lecture and then tested their comprehension. Some students were randomly assigned to do some short tasks on their laptops during the lecture (e.g., look up movie times). Others were allowed to focus on the lecture. All seats were randomly assigned.
As expected, the multitasking students learned less than those focused on the lecture, scoring about 11 percent lower on a test. What is more surprising: the learning of students near the multitaskers also suffered. Students who could see the screen of a multitaskers laptop (but were not multitasking themselves) scored 17 percent lower on comprehension than those who had no distracting view. Its hard to stay focused when a field of laptops open to Facebook, Snapchat, and email lies between you and the lecturer.
Learning researchers hypothesize that, because students can type faster than they can write, a lecturers words flow straight from the students ears through their typing fingers, without stopping in the brain for substantive processing.
These studies, like all lab experiments, took place under artificial circumstances. Students were paid to participate, lectures were unrelated to actual coursework, and performance on tests had no bearing on college grades. This controlled setting allowed researchers to carefully manipulate conditions and thereby try to tease out the mechanisms underlying the effect of laptop use on learning.
But what happens in a real classroom, over multiple lectures? Perhaps laptop-using students review and encode their notes later, after class. They might even perform better on assessments, since they have more accurate notes for review. Further, students might work harder to stay focused on the lecture, even in the face of distractions, when their grades are at stake.
To capture these real-world dynamics requires randomly assigning hundreds of college students to different classroom conditions. At the United States Military Academy (commonly known as West Point), a team of researchers took on this task.
All West Point students take a semester-long, introductory economics class, taught by professors in sections of no more than twenty students. Students in this introductory class all take the same multiple-choice and short-answer tests, which are administered online and graded automatically. This provides a consistent measure for comparisons of learning across sections.
The researchers randomly assigned these sections to one of three conditions: 1) electronics allowed, 2) electronics banned, and 3) tablet computers allowed, but only if laid flat on desks where professors could observe their use. Because professors at West Point teach multiple sections of the same class in a given semester, the researchers assigned each professor to more than one treatment condition.

---

Are you a MexiCAN or a MexiCAN'T - Johnny Depp 'Once Upon A Time in Mexico'