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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.

15 of 39 comments (clear)

  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
  3. 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
  4. 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 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.

    2. 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.

    3. 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
  5. 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).

    --
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  6. 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.

       

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. 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!

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    #DeleteChrome