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Using Electronic Devices During Lectures Led To Lower Grades, Study Finds (upi.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the school-daze dept.

schwit1 quotes UPI: For the study, researchers followed 118 cognitive psychology students at Rutgers University in New Jersey. For one term, electronic devices were banned in half of the lectures and permitted in the other half. When the devices were allowed, students reported whether they had used them for non-learning purposes during the lecture.

Having an electronic device wasn't associated with lower students' scores in comprehension tests within lectures, but was associated with at least a 5 percent (half-a-grade) lower score in end-of-term exams.

The study was published July 27 in the journal Educational Psychology.

39 comments

  1. Yep by Artem+S.+Tashkinov · · Score: 4, Interesting

    People are generally bad multitaskers? Electronic devices might cause ADHD? News at 11.

  2. Behold! by Qbertino · · Score: 1

    The allmighty and ever-knowing Captain Obvious has spoken!

    --
    We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
    1. Re: Behold! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I don't know man. Did they use any electronic devices during this study?
      There's a study that shows that might interfere with the results.

    2. Re:Behold! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Indeed. People who don't pay attention remember less. Film at 11.

  3. All kinds of wrong with this study by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    Starting with:

    researchers followed 118 cognitive psychology students

    Getting published having fun with statistics.

  4. Hearing aid by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If I didn't have my hearing aids in lecture I'm sure my grades would be lower, not higher.

    1. Re:Hearing aid by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      hahahaha that was funny, whoever downmodded this has no sense of humour

  5. Paying attention in class is good! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Who knew?!?!

  6. Re:Lectures are so stupid by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Read a book, work on projects/problems, go to a small discussion group led by a reasonably competent person who is there to facilitate discussion and directly answer basic questions.

    ORLY?

    Without any knowledge, how do you even know where to begin learning about any subject?

    How would you identify a "resonably competent person"?

    Didn't think of any of that, did you?

  7. Slow writing by Luthair · · Score: 1

    For me the opposite would have been true. I've always been a slow writer and in university before I had a laptop taking notes I'd fall far enough behind that the board I was trying to copy would get erased.

    1. Re:Slow writing by rtb61 · · Score: 1

      I just went through past exam papers. Cross correlated them to the material handed out this time round and what the lecturer tended to focus on. I then copied across the most likely exam questions (pay attention to repeats, they are likely to repeat again) and researched and wrote down the best answers, for each question and I had my study notes, which I would read out aloud ie using multiple areas of the brain to process the data, reading, writing, talking. Doing the exam, I would got to the essay question and during the reading and note taking part, actually start writing the essay down in rough form during the reading portion of the exam, which I would then rewrite after going through the rest of the exam. What I did during lectures, well I actually participated, help support the lecturer in their efforts, bit of moral support, they perform better if you do. Notes, were mainly to pick up on what the lecturer was emphasising, trying to guesstimate what would and would not be in the exam. I did much better at exams with not much effort, than I did with projects, well to be honest, with not much effort ;D.

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
  8. Repetition Is the Key to Learning by bobstreo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Repetition Is the Key to Learning

    Repetition Is the Key to Learning

    And the best way to learn (for me) was to write down notes, and when an exam was coming up, I'd write anything important down.

    If the brain couldn't directly remember during an exam, my fingers and pen or pencil actually would...

    1. Re:Repetition Is the Key to Learning by Kjella · · Score: 0

      I hated note-taking, if the teacher/professor wouldn't give you a full written transcript/curriculum so he'd force you to be in class I felt he was just protecting his own job. That is not to say I couldn't make notes of my own, but they'd be mine not copying the teacher's. Though I preferred reading and exercises, plain writing didn't really help me at all.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    2. Re:Repetition Is the Key to Learning by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I hated note-taking, if the teacher/professor wouldn't give you a full written transcript/curriculum so he'd force you to be in class I felt he was just protecting his own job. That is not to say I couldn't make notes of my own, but they'd be mine not copying the teacher's. Though I preferred reading and exercises, plain writing didn't really help me at all.

      Welcome to life - where you're expected to show up.

    3. Re:Repetition Is the Key to Learning by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is what I had been told throughout my childhood. But when it started to matter, in University, I realized that attention, not repetition is the key to learning. It's like simultaneous interpreting: once the session is over you don't remember much of it, because your brain was busy transforming the text instead of thinking about the ideas. It's not sufficient to "follow" a lecture only to the extent that you can jot down "anything important". It's even probable that you will miss the really important parts because you're not engaging with the subject matter.

    4. Re:Repetition Is the Key to Learning by timholman · · Score: 4, Interesting

      And the best way to learn (for me) was to write down notes, and when an exam was coming up, I'd write anything important down.

      My 25 years of teaching experience has repeatedly demonstrated to me that handing out Powerpoint slides, or distributing the instructor's lecture notes in PDF form, is a recipe for underperformance with students.

      Requiring students to take their own handwritten notes (forcing them to organize and follow the material in their own minds) significantly improves their comprehension of the material. If someone else's notes are right in front of them, students tend to "zone out". That is especially true in today's classroom environment where cellphones and laptop computers compete for their attention.

      For most students, electronic devices of any type are a distraction in the classroom. Paper and pen/pencil (or a really good tablet with pen entry) will beat them every time.

    5. Re:Repetition Is the Key to Learning by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      My 25 years of teaching experience has repeatedly demonstrated to me that handing out Powerpoint slides, or distributing the instructor's lecture notes in PDF form, is a recipe for underperformance with students.

      In your 25 years of teaching experience, how much of what you were required to teach was useful or important enough to be memorable without repetition? How well did the students retain the information months or years afterwards?

      I think we are focusing on the wrong problem here.

    6. Re:Repetition Is the Key to Learning by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You realize that the professor gets paid whether you show up or not, right? As long as enrollment in the course is sufficient, the instructor gets paid. In fact, please stay home. I prefer to teach smaller classes with students who actually want to be there; the energy in the classroom is typically better and smaller groups allow for more one-on-one interaction. If you study the material well enough, you will probably pass the course, which is fine by me. If not, better luck next quarter.

    7. Re:Repetition Is the Key to Learning by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I took notes. I never read them - but the act of writing down stuff, fixed it in memory.

      Getting the notes from some professor has no value.

    8. Re:Repetition Is the Key to Learning by cpotoso · · Score: 1

      Studying is not necessarily the learning of a particular skill, but the training/exercising of the mind. Like running on a treadmill is not useful in the sense of going somewhere but for the exercise itself. Perhaps you should consider you may not know all the facts before simply dismissing the opinion of someone who clearly has more experience and knowledge of teaching than you do.

    9. Re:Repetition Is the Key to Learning by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's the same for me. Typing up notes or following along in some pre-printed notes, isn't terribly helpful. I spent time focusing on how to typeset my notes or just zoning out. The devil in most technical work is the details. Following along with my own handwritten notes helps me focus on details.

      I don't have an eidetic memory but it's pretty good. Just having an image of the information is sort of useless to me. How did you go from step 3 to 4? That's what I want to focus on.

    10. Re:Repetition Is the Key to Learning by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That is why you have a book to reference for the class. The professor shouldn't be handing out or teaching from transcripts. I can't even fathom going to school today where they all seem to teach from PowerPoint slides vs. writing things out on the chalkboard. I always considered the single professor I had who lectured that way to simply be a lazy piece of shit.

    11. Re:Repetition Is the Key to Learning by Minupla · · Score: 1

      For most students

      Being one of the exceptions here (auditory learner, dyslexia/dysgraphia (or if you prefer the current parlance 'a specific learning disability in reading' and 'a specific learning disability that affects written expression' - someone was being paid by the word for that update :))), I'm assuming that was the carveout you intended there.

      But as a father of a high functioning ASD child, (who had the bad luck to also inherit Daddy's psych-ed verbiage) what's your experience with ASD kids? is the electronics a help or a hindrance in working around their communications disability?

      Min

      --
      On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
  9. Re:Lectures are so stupid by themusicgod1 · · Score: 2

    how do you even know where to begin learning about any subject?

    • By having enough to eat/a place to stay such that your immediate survival isn't in question. Learning is hard if you're starving.
    • By putting down the distraction rectangle(TFA above is a good example)
    • opening the door to your office/desk/work environment, and being open to how other people might be interested in what you can do for them in that area
    • By desiring to know about the subject, and making a map of the terms involved that you don't know or suspect are being used as terms of art.
    • By finding other people interested in learning about it(Hackerspaces are a great place to do this), and engaging with them with the explicit reason of learning about the topic. Finding or building media that allow you to coordinate this task. Bonus points if you can find people to *teach*.
    • By being humble about what you know and don't, and expecting your initial expectations to be incorrect(especially for softer fields like Economics/Political Economy). And especially: publish your results in a way that other people can replicate.
    • By collecting relevant data, seeking out sources on relevant data, and if they aren't easily accessible trying to reproduce them yourself while being careful to keep track of what you are doing to obtain said data, what that data is, forming hypotheses and testing them.
    • Try to think of a project you can do that relates to your topic of interest, and try to do it.

    It doesn't matter if your adviser is Deepak Chopra, if you follow where the data tells you to go and are careful enough. I've helped people from the age of 4 to 80+ learn topics from algebra to video game development and there is no reason why lectures are particularly better suited for learning, or should be exclusively sought after, though they can be the cheaper option (especially in well-beaten paths like intro-to-programming or intro-to-stats).

    --
    GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
  10. Smarter Students? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What if one class was just literally a little smarter? What if the devices made no difference but the students were just smarter than the other class. Not two classes are exactly alike.

  11. What a surprise by oldgraybeard · · Score: 1

    students using their devices to play games, check and read their social media, watch movies listen to music, generally not paying any attention in class have lower grades! Wow what a discovery!
    Next they will figure out sleeping through classes or not showing up does the same thing!
    Wonder what the cost for this earth shattering research project was.

    Just my 2 cents ;)

    1. Re:What a surprise by Known+Nutter · · Score: 1

      Just my 2 cents ;)

      Well, what else would it be?

      --
      Beware of the Leopard.
    2. Re:What a surprise by j-beda · · Score: 1

      students using their devices to play games, check and read their social media, watch movies listen to music, generally not paying any attention in class have lower grades! Wow what a discovery!
      Next they will figure out sleeping through classes or not showing up does the same thing!

      Wonder what the cost for this earth shattering research project was.

      I have not taken a look at this particular study (I couldn't get to it through a couple of clicks, and I am lazy), but I doubt that it is as cut and dried as you imply.

      This type of study is hard to do well. Questions that are of interest might be: "How much do students use their devices to do non-educational stuff while in the classroom?", "How large of an impact is it?", "Are there effects on other students in the vicinity who are not using a device?", "How does it influence the instructor?", "Are there positive effects for some students?".

      Controlling for confounding effects in human studies can be extremely difficult. In this case they did the study over one semester, with half the lectures (A) banning devices, and half the lectures (B) allowing devices. What if in that semester, Rutgers had a "quiz bowl" team that because of scheduling, made a half dozen super-students schedules limited in such a way that they were all in the A group? Would that skew the results? Were the lectures delivered the same in A and B? Was the lighting in one different than the other? Does time of day mess up your results, either because that causes your students to be different due to other course scheduling or because people learn differently at different times of day.

       

  12. Surprising? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    For how long still are we going to ignore the evidence? Social media, mobile devices, ubiquitous connection 24/7 MAKE PEOPLE DUMBER. As much as I am on the "progressive" crest of the technology perspective, and definitely not a Luddite, I cannot avoid staring at what looks like a self-evident fact.

    But I guess the millennial narrative of the "sharing is caring" does a lot of good to those in power. In fact, I'm pretty sure Mark Zuckerberg's children will be educated to stay as disconnected as possible from the monster their dad created. I predict that those kids who manage to resist the luring grasp of the Social nowadays will be the privileged ones forming the ruling class tomorrow.

    1. Re:Surprising? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm some kind of "early millennial" meaning I knew NES, SNES and MS-DOS and we were early adopters of DSL but didn't have Internet before (circa end of high school)

      What I miss is back then spending 24/7 on the PC, console or Internet was shamed. It was a mark of shame and a sign you were a loser and a virgin. In my country there were a few TV pieces following a couple such failed individuals (on about 13, one 20-something) and they showed their little life and made them meet a psychologist. The latter was funny as he spent his life on counterstrike and we saw him get pwned (and have no money so play with the desert eagle). We shared this on the Internet as .wmv files. Before Flash video playback and cease&desist fucked everything.

      (I was a nerd so I knew to download WMV9 codec and keep using Windows Media Player 6.0 or 6.4 not the newer crappy bloat)
      Well the computer no-life were not so much shamed on the Internet, because for normal people life consisted in 1. outside ; 2. TV. Or the other way around.

  13. People taking notes or surfing Amazon? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I have to wonder if those under achievers are actually taking notes on their device or are on social network or shopping? My daughter has said a few times though that some professors are downright lazy and don't covey the material very well. I think recall is better writing stuff down then trying to type it in notes. especially if your not the greatest at typing.

  14. To Graph or Not Graph Without Graphing Calculator? by The+Original+CDR · · Score: 1

    Graphing calculators became popular when I was in college in the 1990's. One semester I couldn't afford the recommended Texas Instrument graphing calculator for pre-calculus (I ended up owning three models of TI calculator by graduation). A graphing calculator gives you an instant answer and a pretty graph, especially for the more difficult problems. But sometimes drawing the graph is more insightful than having the answer given to you. A lot of students spent more time figuring out how to program their graphing calculator and the instructor got flustered because that problem came up all the time. I got a hard earned B in that class.

  15. Please stop! by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 1

    Lately I keep getting blindsided by these out-of-the-blue, shocking stories! A few days it was the problems at MoviePass; and now this! Once again I was fortunately sitting down... but this one knocked me out of my chair!

    My old heart can’t take it!

    --
    #DeleteChrome
  16. Same instructor those lectures, or? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How similar was the material? I like the study design, but that doesn't mean it was perfect.

    I wonder what the effect is of instructors who over focus on this.

    And what of students who, you know, can't write? Are we going to begin singling them out again?

    This is pointless. How about we simply admit the lecture format is fucked as is. That's where the real harm is being done.

  17. Re: To Graph or Not Graph Without Graphing Calcula by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    To be honest, if you got a B in a class that covers shifting cotangent up three units and two to the left, then you should just fucking kill yourself. There is no need for your lack of intellectual ability on this planet.

  18. Amazing! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    DUH!

    I need to find out how I can get grants to do unnecessary studies in master of the obvious subjects.

  19. Re: To Graph or Not Graph Without Graphing Calcula by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The same could be said more appropriately for someone as hateful as you.