Taking Lecture Notes On A Laptop Might Not Be That Bad After All

By Emma Young “The pen is mightier than the keyboard”… in other words, it’s better to take lecture notes with a pen and paper rather than a laptop. That was the hugely influential conclusion of a paper published in 2014, by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer. The work was picked up by media around the world, and has received extensive academic attention; it’s been cited more than 1,100 times and, the authors of a new paper, also in Psychological Science, point out, it often features in discussions among educators about whether or not to ban laptops from classrooms. However, when Heather Urry at Tufts University, US, and her colleagues ran a direct replication of that original study, their findings told a different story. And it’s one that the team’s additional mini meta-analysis of other directly comparable replications supported: when later quizzed on the contents of a talk, participants who’d taken notes with a pen and paper did no better than those who’d used a laptop. In the new replication, as in the original study, the 142 participants were all university students (this time at Tufts, rather than Princeton), who took notes while watching one of five roughly 15-minute-long TED talks. As before, there was then a roughly 30-minute delay during which they completed distractor tasks. After this, they completed a quiz on the facts and concepts presented in the talk.   When the team analysed the data, they found that, as in the origina...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Educational Memory Replications Source Type: blogs