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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."
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