Friday, November 24, 2017

Laptops Inhibit Learning

As someone who spent 5 years in an online master's degree program, I can tell you that having access to the internet while you're supposed to be learning is distracting.  And I say that as someone who's reasonably bright, motivated to learn, and more focused and disciplined than the average bear.  Thus, I have no doubt that the following is true:
But a growing body of evidence shows that over all, college students learn less when they use computers or tablets during lectures. They also tend to earn worse grades. The research is unequivocal: Laptops distract from learning, both for users and for those around them. It’s not much of a leap to expect that electronics also undermine learning in high school classrooms or that they hurt productivity in meetings in all kinds of workplaces...

The researchers hypothesized that, because students can type faster than they can write, the lecturer’s words flowed right to the students’ typing fingers without stopping in their brains for substantive processing. Students writing by hand had to process and condense the spoken material simply to enable their pens to keep up with the lecture. Indeed, the notes of the laptop users more closely resembled transcripts than lecture summaries. The handwritten versions were more succinct but included the salient issues discussed in the lecture...

At the United States Military Academy, a team of professors studied laptop use in an introductory economics class. The course was taught in small sections, which the researchers randomly assigned to one of three conditions: electronics allowed, electronics banned and tablets allowed but only if laid flat on desks, where professors could monitor their use. By the end of the semester, students in the classrooms with laptops or tablets had performed substantially worse than those in the sections where electronics were banned.
Can't pass up a shout-out to my alma mater!

Anyway, go read the whole thing.

4 comments:

  1. Interesting read, got one question. Do you think it would help to hand write notes and later type them up for future use? I've often heard rewriting your lecture notes helps you remember what you took down.

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  2. Anonymous6:46 AM

    But "real learning" isn't necessary because Google or something...

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  3. It doesn't work *as* well in math, of course, but shorthand is a valuable tool. The idea behind shorthand is to write now, type later. And yes, doing both is very helpful.

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  4. When students take notes on laptops they are often typing words without listening. It's how they text on the phone too. But the reality is they are just as likely to be watching a movie, texting a friend, reading another book or playing a game under the guise of multitasking. Anyone who has read The Shallows realizes that multitasking is a myth and that students think they are doing well when in reality they are learning NOTHING. This is also why they are having more car accidents.

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