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Using Laptop To Take Notes Lowers Grades

Posted by timothy on from the but-improves-slashdot-karma dept.

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."

25 of 313 comments (clear)

  1. So basically surfing net while taking notes by cod3r_ · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is the problem.. Common sense

    1. Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

    2. Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes by Huntr · · Score: 4, Informative

      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?

    3. Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

    4. Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes by radiumsoup · · Score: 3, 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.

    5. Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes by David_Hart · · Score: 5, Informative

      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

    6. Re:So basically surfing net while taking notes by Dcnjoe60 · · Score: 3, 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.

  2. what about by rossdee · · Score: 3, Interesting

    what about students that don't take any notes ?

    1. Re:what about by DogDude · · Score: 3, Funny

      what about students that don't take any notes ?

      What about flying elephants? What about cheese?

      Obviously, students that don't take notes wasn't part of this study.

      --
      I don't respond to AC's.
    2. Re:what about by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      What about flying elephants? What about cheese?
      Obviously, students that don't take notes wasn't part of this study.

      They should have been. When I was in college I rarely took notes, because taking notes is also distracting. It may well be that the act of taking notes itself decreases grades.

      As to flying elephants, I doubt any high level Republicans had computers when they were in school. Considering my own Congressman, Rodney Davis, a tea party wacko who believes that global warming ended fifteen years ago and has said so publically, well, he's pretty cheezy but I don't think he even graduated high school. The man is a real moron.

    3. Re:what about by intermodal · · Score: 4, Informative

      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!
  3. Hardly surprising.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

    1. Re:Hardly surprising.... by 16Chapel · · Score: 5, Insightful

      YMMV - personally I learnt best by listening to the lecturer and digesting what they're saying (and, even better, asking the odd question). Writing things down doesn't help me remember, and never has - I actually find it distracting.

    2. Re:Hardly surprising.... by TrekkieGod · · 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.

      --

      Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.

    3. Re:Hardly surprising.... by fuzzyf · · Score: 3, Interesting

      We had a professor who started out writing all kinds of stuff on the board, and after a while he asked if we had written it down.
      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.

    4. Re:Hardly surprising.... by Nemyst · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Interestingly, I had a similar experience with my classical mechanics prof, except he did away with the note-taking altogether. Instead, we'd have to read parts of the course textbook before each class, take a small and simple online quizz to check you'd actually read it (the quizz was very loosely timed so you could go back and pick up the answers from the book if you wanted) and then show up in class with nothing in hand. The entire course was dedicated to the prof showing us a variety of questions, usually in the form of simple problems, and asking us to choose one of four possible answers. Once the problem was exposed, we'd get a few minutes to discuss with others and then would have to vote on what we believed was the correct answer. The prof would then explain the right answer, with more details if more people got it wrong.

      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.

  4. Recording pen by erik.martino · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  5. Another hypothesis by Sigg3.net · · Score: 4, 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.

    --
    Defining Statistics and Social Research
  6. Two other possibilities by barlevg · · Score: 4, 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. Hand-written notes certainly fall in the category of harder-to-read.

  7. Handwriting Reinforces Learning by snookerdoodle · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  8. Taking notes period lowers grades by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

  9. Doesn't need to be multi-tasking by gstoddart · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  10. As the NRA would say by colinrichardday · · Score: 4, Funny

    You'll get my Freecell when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands!

  11. Mental discipline is not as necessary with laptop by John+Allsup · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  12. Memorization based classes by Ambassador+Kosh · · Score: 3, 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.

    --
    Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD! :)