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Using Laptop To Take Notes Lowers Grades
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."
A computer is not the best device for note taking. Using a LiveScribe pen you can transfer your notes to the computer, including a recording the voice of the lecturer. The pen makes your notes hypertext because it is linked with the audio at the time of note taking. It makes it easy to navigate in the audio recording.
A memory trick I once learned (for remember names or phone numbers, for example) is to write the item with your finger on a roughish surface like your pants 3 times. This often works for me.
There have been studies (like this one) that seem to show that writing something down by hand reinforces learning. I'm surprised the author didn't think this might be relevant.
Exactly. Here's the paper. It says right there that the students who multi-tasked while taking notes did worse and that some of the participants didn't even adhere to the instructions for their group, i.e., they surfed and screwed around when they weren't supposed to. And then did poorly on a quiz. Gee, who saw that coming?
I would tend to agree with you on note-taking. I found that when I took notes, I generally missed about half the class. My final GPA was something like 3.979, so I feel pretty confident that it worked for me.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Exactly. Here's the paper. It says right there that the students who multi-tasked while taking notes did worse and that some of the participants didn't even adhere to the instructions for their group, i.e., they surfed and screwed around when they weren't supposed to. And then did poorly on a quiz. Gee, who saw that coming?
Why is it that we believe that we can multi-task? In regards to work, humans cannot do true multi-tasking. We are either concentrating on performing one task or are are task switching by concentrating on multiple tasks in much smaller time slices. People are lauded for being multi-taskers, but the end result is that they end up doing more than one thing poorly, as we see in the study results.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_multitasking
THAN! Not THEN! Than is a comparison, X is lower than Y. Then means subsequent, X happened then Y happened. I usually ignore this on twitter and forums, but when a news item gets it wrong then I get annoyed.