Using Laptop To Take Notes Lowers Grades 313
Meshach writes "A study in the journal Computers & Education found that students who took notes on a laptop got lower marks then student who took notes the traditional way with pen and paper. The study's author hypothesized that using a laptop leads to multitasking (i.e. surfing the net or checking email), which reduces concentration."
10 Bucks says (Score:2, Interesting)
10 Bucks says that the manufacturers are so dependent on getting their machines in schools that they simply release locked down and crippled 'student edition' machines.
what about (Score:4, Interesting)
what about students that don't take any notes ?
Another hypothesis (Score:5, Interesting)
Another hypothesis, arguably more difficult to empirically explicate, would be that the brain treats the two tasks differently memory-wise.
I prefer writing by hand. When the lecture is good, I do my best to get it verbatim. I find that an hour after the lecture has ended, I can cite the professor pretty accurate. However, when I write something on the computer my mind immediately blanks it out.
Consequently, writing by hand is more efficient _in studying_ because my brain at least remembers some of it. I'd think people are different when it comes to this, but for me the difference is considerable.
Two other possibilities (Score:5, Interesting)
1. People who take hand-written notes often later transcribe them digitally, thus going over the notes one more time than people who just record them digitally in the first place.
2. Studies have that reading harder-to-read fonts assist in recall/retention. [bbc.co.uk] Hand-written notes certainly fall in the category of harder-to-read.
Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes (Score:5, Interesting)
Back when I was in an undergrad psychology course, the general consensus was that the method used triggered different parts of the brain. There is something fundamentally different from moving your finger to a particular location and pressing a key than actually moving your hand around to create a string of letters and then focusing on what you have just created.
Taking notes period lowers grades (Score:3, Interesting)
My GPA went up one full letter grade when I stopped taking notes in class - period. It was far more instructive to actually pay attention to what was being said and to think about it while it was being discussed, than to simply focus all of my cerebral effort on transcribing what was being written on the board.
Mental discipline is not as necessary with laptop (Score:4, Interesting)
If you rely on a wordprocessor to type your work rather than a typesetting language, you can just tap away until things look about right, whereas with non wysiwyg methods you need to have a greater understanding of how the document is set out.
If you can recall your notes from your laptop via Spotlight or from some database, you don't need to learn to organise your notes like you do with paper.
These and many more examples are the problem. Pen and paper rewards a disciplined mind in a way that mindlessly tapping away on a laptop doesn't. (When writing my PhD thesis, I first handwrote pretty much everything, then typed it up in LaTeX. When helping someone set out precise diagrams in Microsoft Word, I ended up having to print to postscript, preview in gv (this was circa 2000) and then move things around in Word so that they looked wrong in Word but right on paper.)
Laptops reward non-intelligent laziness in a bad way, and people who use computers should be encouraged more to learn to do things in a harder and more manual way to learn the self-discipline, and the need for sufficient practice to maintain this discipline, before fully relying on a computer to make life easier.
There is a well known saying in mathematics: once you've learned to do things the hard way, people don't care if you're sloppy. Learn things the hard way first.
Re:Hardly surprising.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was schooled in the late 1970's/early 1980's - way before the advent of computers in the classroom. We were taught that writing things down (even copying from a book) helped the content to 'sink in' to your memory far better than just reading it and I believe this to be true - even now when I take my own notes I remember the content pretty well.
I was taught the same thing but didn't really believe it for most of my time in school. That is, until I got to college and had this professor for diff eq. that had the oddest teaching method ever:
At the start of the class he would start writing on the blackboard, not saying a word. He just copied his (very organized) notes to the board. Very dense writing, a lot of content. When that board was filled, he would continue on and do the same thing on a second blackboard that was located on a side-wall of the classroom. About half the class time was spent that way. Then when the boards were filled, and we were finished copying everything, he would go back to the beginning and start talking about what he had written.
It sounds like a colossal waste of class time, but not only did we cover everything the classes in other sessions covered, I never had to study for an exam in that class. While we're copying things down we're reading it and we're paying attention to what we're reading because we need to replicate it. Then when he was actually there explaining things, we already had an idea of what he was going to talk about, we had already thought about it and understood a few things and not others. We weren't distracted by trying to take notes and were actually listening to what he was saying. In fact, when he said something that cleared something up in our minds that wasn't clear from the notes, I'd just jot something quickly in the margin. Which is funny because although that notebook contains the most detailed notes I've ever taken for any class, I've never had to go back to re-read it. Everything just stuck for the exam.
Lowest amount of work and greatest amount of retention I've ever had for any subject in a classroom. It's been about a decade, and I still remember a good deal about slope fields, bifurcations, characteristic equations, and laplace transforms, among other topics. I think the prof also got a kick out of not explaining to anyone that this was his teaching method the first day of class. We were all sitting there and saw this guy just start writing a ton of stuff up on the board. He waited until he got the boards filled up before introducing himself.
Worse than the article suggests (Score:2, Interesting)
The effect was observed not only on the person using the laptop to take notes, but also on the surrounding students who weren't, presumably because the laptop was a significant distraction.
Memorization based classes (Score:4, Interesting)
It looks like the entire thing was just wrote memorization which is darn close to completely worthless. People took notes and then did a multiple choice exam to repeat back the information in the notes.
Honestly, with or without a computer I find it very hard to pay attention or care in any memorization based class. The experience is pointless since memorizing the information gives you nothing on how to really use it, how to evaluate if you are within bounds for something, out of bounds, at an unstable point etc.
That is why I like my engineering classes. They give us real problems on exams and expect us to solve them in a more realistic way at least. The exams are normally open book, notes, pretty darn advanced calculators etc and the problems are hard as hell. If you don't understand how to approach the problems, how to figure out how to do them you have no chance of solving them in time. You can't learn from the book as you go. However, during the exams you need to figure out what information you need that is not provided in the problem, look at up in the books in charts, tables, equations etc.
As a result your hand is not held at every step. You are not told you will need certain values from the steam tables, others from phase diagrams, other relationships or equilibriums etc. You are expected to figure that out just like you do in the real world.
During our classes laptops are great for notes. Most of our lectures are on practical problem solving and being able to look things up, use MATLAB or Excel to work on the problems etc is a huge gain and you have those later to refer to. One of the things our professors emphasize is to LOOK IT UP. If you do something from memorization and it is wrong you can get people killed in engineering. It takes almost no effort and time to look something up so look it up every single time.
The important things to learn in class are how to setup the problems, why you set them up that way, what boundaries you need to watch for, what does the answer mean etc. The actual mechanical cranking of solving the problem is something that you pretty much just hand to a computer now. Being able to solve a system of 40+ ODEs by hand is not a useful skill. You will screw that up and you will waste a lot of time getting stuck in the details instead of learning how understand the system and how stable it is.
Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes (Score:3, Interesting)
Back when I was in an undergrad psychology course, the general consensus was that the method used triggered different parts of the brain. There is something fundamentally different from moving your finger to a particular location and pressing a key than actually moving your hand around to create a string of letters and then focusing on what you have just created.
Exactly. The act of writing triggers the learning centre of the brain. Additionally, since we rarely write as fast as the teacher/instructor speaks the student is forced to develop their short-term memory which acts as an I/O buffer further leading to improved retention of the information presented in class. Computers are fantastic for organizing notes and assignments, and with the advent of smartpens students get the best of both worlds (manual note taking and electronic organization). I have a fee of problems with smartpens, however. The form-factor of these pens is not the same as the traditional pen making them difficult to hold for an extended period of time. The writing nibs are not as smooth as traditional pens. The special paper should allow for erasure and updating of the written content and only when the student presses the smartpen on a specific icon on the paper page should the electronic impression of the page be created. In fact, smartpencils instead of smartpens would be a much better writing instrument all around.
Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes (Score:4, Interesting)
read the parent without the word "additionally" in the third sentence; it's the same idea, and probably shouldn't have been characterized quite the way it ended up being.
It triggers the learning center of the brain BECAUSE it forces you to utilize short-term memory and summarize ideas in your own way.
Re:Hardly surprising.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Most of us said: "Yes"
He then asked: "Why?"
Then he proceeded to tell us that he had written down random stuff that had nothing to do with the topic. The point of this exercise was to make us think about what we wrote down. Write it down in our own language and ask questions if we don't understand something. Because if we didn't understand it during the lecture, we wouldn't understand it when reviewing notes later on.
Helped me a lot.
Re:Hardly surprising.... (Score:5, Interesting)
It was truly a breath of fresh air compared to any other course structure I have since had. We didn't waste time taking an inordinate amount of notes we'd never read, we didn't have to split our attention between note-taking and what the prof had to say, etc. He also claimed that ever since he started doing that, grades had notably improved in his class.
Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes (Score:4, Interesting)
But is our brain that existed before writing actually triggered by writing specifically? Or is that essentially learned behavior from years of schooling that uses writing in learning? The brain predates writing after all.
If people typed notes from day 1 in school would the act of typing "trigger the learning centre of the brain"?
Not that that sounds like a good thing, pen and paper is nice and quiet. And having to copy notes by rewriting them rather than ctrl-C, ctrl-V seems a good thing in itself.
Probably not for the same reason that the learning centers in the brain are triggered very early in infancy, long before there would be the ability to type anything. Human beings learn how to speak and construct sentences long before formal education. They do so by actually practicing the skill. Human beings learn about spatial relationships long before they have geometry and math. They do so by throwing things, etc. In otherwords, our brains are wired to learn from the five senses and long before we get to formal education or would have the ability to type or write, we have created billions of connections of neuron pathways that reinforce that.
Your last sentence is important, too. To copy your notes, you have to rewrite them. Everytime you do, you are reinforcing what ever it is, because your brain has to process it. Copy and paste doesn't do that. That is why the baby boomers used to have to write spelling words over and over to learn how to spell them or for punishment you had to write some sentence out 100 times. The repetition of writing over and over reinforced whatever the "lesson" was just like practicing free throws does for a basketball player.
Because of the way we type, even for good typists that doesn't happen. We see the letters and words and just repeat them, we don't actually read them. As such, the level of recall, for most people, is very low when compared to having to physically copy something by hand. Again, evolution (or ID for those that subscribe to it) has our brains wired to use as many of the senses as possible to process the world around us.Writing is an extension of our speech and language centers, typing is not, at least when done for notetaking.