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

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.

Comments

Yep

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

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

Repetition Is the Key to Learning

[bobstreo]

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...

Re:Repetition Is the Key to Learning

[timholman]

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.

Re:Lectures are so stupid

[themusicgod1]

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).