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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."
Is the problem.. Common sense
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 students that don't take any notes ?
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.
Cut and paste or typing on a screen knowing you can save it to disc for easy recovery later does nothing for the memory - indeed the whole act is designed to save data to magnetic storage rather than brain cells!
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.
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.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
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. Hand-written notes certainly fall in the category of harder-to-read.
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.
Taking notes in general is just distracting. Better to listen and think, and use the book when you get home.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I find that taking very sparse notes, or none, depending on the subject, I will get more out of a lecture. As long as there is a good textbook or other reference I can use it to clarify confusions later. I find generally that when writing or typing, the info isn't being stored in my brain as well.
Of course, I often also find it helpful to have a book on an unrelated subject and to split my attention back and forth to it and the lecture to control my short attention span, so I'm weird.
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.
Multi-tasking is a plausible explanation, but I can posit another one quite easily.
If instead of focusing on writing the content you're trying to do any form of formatting, layout, entering equations, trying to do diagrams -- you are already multi-tasking and part of your attention is on the device instead of what you're listening to.
I've tried taking notes on a laptop, and I found it distracting and more trouble than it's worth. If you can see the Prof is drawing a quadrant or a graph, you can do that by hand far faster on a sheet of paper.
Maybe someone can do it, but for me, I find that good old fashioned paper is still the most effective way for me to take notes and commit stuff to paper and I can annotate it later.
I just don't think the input techniques we have available to us are anywhere near as effective as pen and paper.
My guess? Give someone a laptop which has no internet connectivity while they're taking notes, and with only the application open they're directly using -- and they'll still do worse.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
You'll get my Freecell when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands!
If you have no calculator, you need to master mental arithmetic. If you have a calculator, you just keep a-pressing those buttons, and don't even notice when something goes amiss (like when you (think you) pressed 5 * 7 6 3 = and got 4578).
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.
John_Chalisque
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.
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.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
...to record the audio from the lesson while you play farmville or whatever hell kids play these days. Problem solved.
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
Prime example of someone who was using a computer take notes when they were supposed to learning about THAN and THEN. Good catch.
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.