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Students Are Better Off Without a Laptop in the Classroom

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Students Are Better Off Without a Laptop in the Classroom

#111

Post by zeveb »

cmiles74 wrote: post #25
brightball wrote: post #20

Shocker. I remember being part of Clemson's laptop pilot program in 1998. If you were ever presenting you basically had to ask everyone to close their laptops or their eyes would never even look up.

I see this a lot in the workplace as well.

I ban laptops from meetings I run. We're here to meet, present information, receive information, share information, make arguments, come to conclusions: we're not in a meeting in order to futz about tweaking our personal blogs.

I also like 15-minute meetings or less. Other folks seem fine with multi-hour meetings where everyone is goofing off on his laptop.

Re: Students Are Better Off Without a Laptop in the Classroom

#112

Post by wazanator »

nambit wrote: post #100
ericcumbee wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they aren't as effective as hand written notes. but in my case Neatly typed, well organized notes using OneNote 2003 were more effective than hastily hand written mostly illegible notes.

The reason hand written notes are more effective is that it helps towards better learning just by writing the thing down and slowing it to a pace where your mind can make memories. Even if afterwards the notes are completely illegible, I would argue it's more effective than typed notes.

A good compromise imo is to type them out in class and hand write them later.

Re: Students Are Better Off Without a Laptop in the Classroom

#113

Post by jerrylives »

DINKDINK wrote: post #85
zeta0134 wrote: post #74

Oh, okay, I thought the study was going to be on the benefits of attempting to use the laptop itself for classroom purposes, not for social media distractions. This would be more accurately titled, "Students Are Better Off Without Distractions in the Classroom." Though I suppose, it wouldn't make a very catchy headline. I found my laptop to be very beneficial in my classroom learning during college, but only when I m…

>I opened up a word processor, focused my eyes on the professor's slides or visual aids, and typed everything I saw There are studies that show that verbatim computer note taking is actually inferior to remembering the lecture content: A Learning Secret: Don’t Take Notes with a Laptop https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret...

It's almost as if people can live their own lives and figure out if note taking on a computer works or doesn't for them?

Re: Students Are Better Off Without a Laptop in the Classroom

#114

Post by snakeanus »

imgabe wrote: post #60

I went to college just as laptops were starting to become ubiquitous, but I never saw the point of them in class. I still think they're pretty useless for math, engineering, and science classes where you need to draw symbols and diagrams that you can't easily type. Even for topics where you can write prose notes, I always found it more helpful to be able to arrange them spatially in a way that made sense rather than…

> I still think they're pretty useless for math, engineering, and science classes where you need to draw symbols and diagrams that you can't easily type

I use latex for special symbols and some diagrams. I do the rest of the diagrams with some form of painting/vector program or ascii art.

> rather than the limited order of a text editor or word processor

What do you mean by that?

Re: Students Are Better Off Without a Laptop in the Classroom

#115

Post by ghaff »

scottLobster wrote: post #57
deadhead wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not an option for everyone. I had a classmate in undergrad who had a medical condition where they could not take notes by hand. They even had a doctor's note saying that they had to have a laptop in class.

Not physically able to use hands != perfectly able to use hands but was failed by their elementary school system and now rationalizes that learning to write legibly is somehow a waste of time ;) Not to be too personal, 99% of college students (including myself back in the day) are lazy rationalizers in some fashion. In my experience it's not until Junior/Senior year that some majors start squeezing that out.

On the other hand, I had some number of years of handwriting class in grade school (Palmer script) and handwriting was consistently my lowest grade as I recall. It's never been good in spite of considerable practice--and it's slowly deteriorated to almost illegible today.

Re: Students Are Better Off Without a Laptop in the Classroom

#116

Post by njarboe »

This is a summary of an article titled "Logged In and Zoned Out: How Laptop Internet Use Relates to Classroom Learning" published in Psychological Science in 2017; The DOI is 10.1177/0956797616677314 if you want to check out the details.

Abstract: Laptop computers are widely prevalent in university classrooms. Although laptops are a valuable tool, they offer access to a distracting temptation: the Internet. In the study reported here, we assessed the relationship between classroom performance and actual Internet usage for academic and nonacademic purposes. Students who were enrolled in an introductory psychology course logged into a proxy server that monitored their online activity during class. Past research relied on self-report, but the current methodology objectively measured time, frequency, and browsing history of participants’ Internet usage. In addition, we assessed whether intelligence, motivation, and interest in course material could account for the relationship between Internet use and performance. Our results showed that nonacademic Internet use was common among students who brought laptops to class and was inversely related to class performance. This relationship was upheld after we accounted for motivation, interest, and intelligence. Class- related Internet use was not associated with a benefit to classroom performance.

Re: Students Are Better Off Without a Laptop in the Classroom

#117

Post by ndh2 »

spike021 wrote: post #109
nambit wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason hand written notes are more effective is that it helps towards better learning just by writing the thing down and slowing it to a pace where your mind can make memories. Even if afterwards the notes are completely illegible, I would argue it's more effective than typed notes.

I've always wondered about this. What makes handwriting different from typing in terms of memory recall, other than the fact that most, if not everyone, have written with pen and paper for far longer than typing?

There have been studies done with children that come to the same conclusion. For some reason, writing with pen and paper is better for recall. I don't know why, though.

Re: Students Are Better Off Without a Laptop in the Classroom

#120

Post by discreditable »

killjoywashere wrote: post #101
discreditable wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd really like to see a comparison of written notes on a laptop vs paper. Many schools are moving towards tablet PC devices to enable handwritten notes on the computer.

I did this study! In med school I did a survey of my class. I asked them to estimate how many hours they spent engaged in various study behaviors, and asked as one question, what quintile of the class they thought they stood in. Allowing for the Duning-Kruger effect, taking notes by hand was one of the top three things you could do (out of about 30), taking no notes had no effect, and taking notes with a laptop was t…

What I meant was taking notes "by hand" on a computer using a stylus.
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