"Every semester, college instructors face a choice: whether to restrict the use of laptops and other devices in their classrooms or to, instead, let students decide for themselves.
And for classrooms that do allow devices, students face an ongoing set of choices: to take notes electronically or by hand, to check the textbook or the text message, to check Instagram or Twitter." …
http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/07/11/485490818/is-it-time-to-ban-computers-from-classrooms
My daughter always took notes in college by hand - in a computer class one semester she was the only one not typing their notes into a device during class - and it was a huge class with like 100 students.
LOL I read most of this thinking it was about high school classrooms.
At college the answer is easy. The students are there to learn and paying for the priviledge. if they cant pay attention because they are plyaing on their device, thats where drop outs come from.
Really an age old problem just a new method of failure.
Like it or not, the world has changed. Trying to undo the increasing ubiquitousness of computers is pointless.
It should be up to the instructor. I don’t allow them in my discussion sections (unless they’re specifically doing an exercise on computers or something) because there is no reason to take notes and it’s awkward to just sit there while everyone is zoned out.
In lecture, I don’t care. It’s your issue if you don’t pay attention.
I can’t take notes by hands due to arthritis in my hands but even before that I hated taking notes by hands. No, I don’t stay on notes the whole time.
My kids came from a HS where everyone had a school provided laptop, and they were in trouble if they did not bring them to class and keep them charged. You might as well take away their pencil as their computer – it is very integrated with how they take notes and track assignments. One also has a learning disability, and one symptom is handwriting difficulty. It is part of her disability accommodations to use her laptop. My kids watched when sitting in classes whether laptops were used – D1 took one college off her list where no one used them, partly for that reason. That ship has sailed, we aren’t going back.
I hope they do allow them for some classes. My programming class was taught in a lecture hall, so the instructor used a computer and projected it on the screen. The students could either write down the commands on paper or bring their computer and program along with the teacher. I found the latter helped me understand it much better.
There was a guy who sat next to me in differential equations. He would play video games on his phone during class and still did better than me on some of the tests.
Computers can be a useful tool, but where it’s possible for the students and teachers, I’m a fan of good ol’ fashioned dead trees and ink. Various studies have shown this helps recall (computer science/programming classes are an exception of course).
Where computers are far more convenient, I’m all for their use, but I understand perfectly why some of my teachers take periodic walks to the back of the class. When the teacher can see what’s on everyone’s screen, productivity goes up. It’s not that computers are bad - we just need to figure out how to police their use adequately.
My kid was chosen for this summer-long academic thing where kids leave their homes and stay in the dorms and take classes with the other participants. When they enter the classroom, they must surrender all phones and electronic devices (they are locked in a box) and they don’t get them back until the afternoon. Though my son will be loathe to admit it, it’s been the best academic experience of his life.
Meanwhile, my D is studying in europe this summer and their professor requires a hand-written daily journal of their 11-week journey to be turned in at the end of the semester. She’s loved scribbling away in her journal as they travel by train and i admire the professor for sticking to her guns.
I purposely got my kid a ultralight laptop figuring that she would be using it to take notes in class. The reality is that most of her professors ban them. In some classes, students using laptops were requested to sit in one area only. In classes where they are allowed, it can be distracting since students will be surfing the web, watching Netflix or checking Facebook. She ended up taking most notes by hand. For her, she finds that she remember it batter that way.
She even had one professor that wanted one type of assignment handed in on index cards.
I actually still struggle with this personally. I go through a ton of continuous education as part of my job. If I just sit and listen and pay attention I get a better grasp of the material and I’m more engaged and ask more questions. But over the course of an hour or two a lot of it also slips through my fingers and at the end of a session I know I forgot a lot. But then if I’m taking notes I can fall behind the lecture and not properly comprehend/integrate the material. I try and do a little of both but it’s a tough balancing act.
Concepts stay with me when I manually write notes as opposed to typing where you just go so fast your fingers are flying and nothing really sticks. It’s a whole lot easier to reread my notes but sometimes I lose the concept as I’m typing where as when I’m writing, it seems to go fixate in my brain? That probably makes no sense to anyone but me.
One of my kids is moderately dysgraphic, but can key at great speed. He is also a good artist, so it’s not fine motor skills. IRL, writing longhand is unnecessary; tuitions are paid and kids should be able to take notes in whatever form works for them. Is this really a problem?
Years ago when I was college I carried a portable tape recorder and used it in each lecture. I always set in the front row. I would play the lecture back to myself on the ride home and once again when I got home. It worked well for me. Today is a new day and I say let the kids use whatever works for them. If they rather play on twitter or facebook failing is on them.
Couple things.
-726 sophomores divided over 50 courses suggests that there were about 14-15 students per course. It’s very likely that in smaller classes, a computer may not provide much benefit to a student because smaller classes are typically more discussion based and professors tend to engage more with the students in front of them. Computers might be detrimental in those cases. What about a 100-300+ person lecture hall, when the professor is mostly lecturing and the student has to take down notes?
-Different class types might lend themselves better. This RCT tested one type of class, which is necessary for a trial to be truly controlled but limits its generalizability. I don’t know how much memorization college-level introductory economics takes, but I would imagine that courses that require a lot of memorization - like biology or organic chemistry - may fare differently.
-A difference of less than 2 points truly is tiny. 1/5 of a standard deviation is really small. If you think about a grading scale out of 100 with a 10-point standard deviation, that’s the difference between getting an 85 and an 83 in the class. And that’s without controlling for who was fooling around on their computer and who was actually taking notes.
-It is definitely true that students who take notes by computer are more likely to write down notes verbatim and less likely to engage with the material deeply by noting only what they need. I’ve seen it happen. The solution is to teach students how to take notes effectively. Nobody is going to ban them from bringing their work laptop to meetings, so they’re going to have to learn how to take notes on a computer eventually.
Another way to get a handle on the magnitude of this effect is to compare it to other ways one could improve student learning. Based on prior studies assessing the impact of teacher quality at the high-school level, the study authors suggest that “removing laptops and tablets from a classroom is equivalent to improving the quality of the teacher by more than a standard deviation.”
You can’t use a high school-level study to make comments about improvements of teaching quality at the college level. The teachers are trained completely differently, with different backgrounds and knowledge levels, and the students have at least an additional year if not 2-3 of maturity and learning behind them.
These were my thoughts exactly, and I wouldn’t recommend overall banning computer use because the overall average difference was essentially 2 points in a 100-point class with a 10-point SD (and especially because we don’t know why). There’s also the issue of students with learning or other disabilities who benefit greatly from having a computer to help them keep up.
In one class I TAed for we did ask the students who were going to fool around to sit in the back of the class, because it was distracting to look down-row and your classmate is shopping for shoes or on Facebook. But there are always going to be distractions.
College students are old enough to come to responsible decisions by themselves. Schools and parents need to stop micromanaging students at some point in their lives. If a student decides to play games during a lecture on their laptop, I don’t see the problem, so long as they doesn’t make noise and sit in the back; it’s their own money they’re wasting. If laptops are banned, they’ll just revert to doodling or sleeping.
If some students benefit from taking notes by hand, they have the option of not bringing a laptop to class. But many other students benefit /from/ laptops; I struggled in high school taking hand-written notes because of OCD, and ended up spending more time in class analyzing the curvatures of my letters and using white-out than actually paying attention. It’s naive to simply say that studies show hand-writing boosts recall.
Thinking about this more. If I were a student today, I’d honestly probably not want to take a class where I could not use a computer to take notes. I have a job now where I am often in a new environment, on a steep learning curve, and listening to other people talk about things I know little about. I pretty much just type everything they say – I can look back later when I need to recall it, and also my mind is a bit of a sieve at my age. My job depends on getting this info the first time somebody tells me, and being able to find it later. And my handwriting is terrible because I do it infrequently.
A couple clients ago they didn’t want to assign me a laptop and wouldn’t let me bring my own. Ugh. Handwriting notes lasted one day, then I found a surreptitious way to take one of their on-call laptops during the day to take to meetings.
Why would I expect students to be hobbled by slow, sloppy, inefficient ways of collecting and storing information? And who is the prof to judge whether it is a time when notes need to be taken, honestly? Even during discussions, other students or the instructor can say something that triggers a thought for exam prep or an upcoming paper. Put me firmly in the laptop camp, and don’t expect me in your classroom if you won’t let me use the most efficient tool for me to record and track information.
No tests in my classes 
If a student really, truly needed to take notes via a laptop in a discussion section and s/he could still do it while being engaged, be my guest.
Students get the syllabus at the beginning of a class. They are welcome to drop it and find another more suited to their learning style. I would do the same thing if I couldn’t type in lectures. I have disability accommodations on file that would allow me to type but I would feel awkward being the only person. (Of course this isn’t an issue now that I don’t take lecture classes but the point still stands.)
I don’t know how you’d take notes in math classes where you are using symbols so much.
Whenever I’ve “allowed” laptops in workshops I’ve ran, it was a disaster. People get distracted, check email, etc.
I don’t really have a dog in the fight either way but there is something to be said for the physicality of writing notes - circling things, drawing arrows, coming up with tree diagrams to show the 3 most important reasons for X, etc that would be hard on a computer. There’s a reason there is the stereotype of the new business or science idea sketched on a cocktail napkin - because paper enables you to conceptually flow through something in a way a computer doesn’t. There’s a reason brainstorming uses big flip charts to circle, build, draw.
“There’s a reason there is the stereotype of the new business or science idea sketched on a cocktail napkin - because paper enables you to conceptually flow through something in a way a computer doesn’t.”
Or because cocktail napkins have been around a lot longer than computers.