Laptops in Class

Thank you bsh1!RebuttalsBsh1 has us consider two things. First is that laptops are a distraction to students and have been shown to cause students to perform worse than those who did not use laptops. Second is that laptops make for shallow learning. Bsh1 then alludes to studies that claim that even with laptop note-takers using the laptop only for note-taking, they still perform worse than students who take notes of paper-pencil note-takers. At least, that's what the article he quotes from says.Counter C1The study that bsh1 has us consider controls for half the class to be allowed to use laptops with the other half not being permitted laptop usage. The study shows that students who use laptops are prone to multi-tasking and concludes that they perform worse. First of all, if the classroom just had no internet connection, multi-tasking wouldn't really be a problem. Second, the measure used to test performance is based on immediate post-lecture tests. That doesn't resemble the real model of education at all. Tests are usually administered weeks, even months if we consider college midterms and finals, after material is presented to a class. The study I cited earlier showed that laptop users who look up things perform worse than people who don't use laptops. The test score of those who use laptops is about 50% and the test scores of those who don't use laptops is 60% based on immediate post-lecture tests. Ok, so the people who used laptops performed bad, but the people who didn't use laptops didn't perform much better. 60% is pretty much a failing grade, a D--. Real students don't take tests immediately after every lecture, and they usually have at least some days to look through their notes to better understand the material. They do homework, exercises and everything in between lectures.The study that bsh1 uses does not account for any of this. It doesn't simulate real education at all so it can't be used to negate the resolution.It also ignores an actual controlled study where students actually don't use laptops for distractions. See, everything has a transition period. The current generation were introduced to laptops as means of distraction in the first place and that's why it is resorted to as a distraction. We didn't use to wear clothes for social purposes, but we've come to normalize clothes as needed not for practical reasons but for social reasons. Same with the laptop. We can ween off the wasteful use mindset, and as we get into further generations, we'll eventually get to a point where laptops or whatever technology we use will be second nature. Then the problem would not be in laptops but in people. If someone is in a lecture and doesn't want to pay attention, it doesn't matter if that someone has a laptop or not, see?Counter C2So the short term studies used by Bsh1 in his first point aren't good, but Bsh1's second point starts to account for the long term effects. The articles he quotes from says: "by laptop typists, more ended up being less: regardless of whether a quiz on the material immediately followed the lecture or took place after a week, the pen-and-paper students performed better"I looked into the article that he got this from (http://www.newyorker.com...) since this point is pretty important. What I found was that it got its claim that laptops are bad note-taking devices for long term use from this study titled, The Pen is Mightier that the Keyboard(1). Let me quote from this study:"We show that whereas taking more notes can be beneficial, laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning"The stuy complains about verbatim note-taking and admits that bad effects happen necessarily because of verbatim note-taking, which is easier with laptops and doesn't really have to do with the laptops themselves. Verbatim notetaking can be done with long-hand notetaking too, and the study admits to it: "Because the detrimental effects of laptop note takingappear to be due to verbatim transcription, perhapsinstructing students not to take verbatim notes could amelioratethe problem. Study 2 aimed to replicate the findingsof Study 1"(1) The problem is that both study 1 and study 2 tested the students shortly after the lectures given. They had the students do 30 minutes of tasks and then take tests based almost entirely on recall with longhanders scoring better than laptoppers. Scoring better and scoring well are not the same thing. This is the same problem as bsh1's first point and does not simulate real-world education. Note-takers did not get a chance to review their notes or to do exercises or homework or anything. It is shown that studying course material is really important to scoring well in anything academic(2) and that these tests don't account for that. The study really is inconclusive.Study 3 of bsh's source tries to account for the effect of studying, allowing the students controlled to study only 10 minutes to review their notes a week after the dummy lecture. Once again, the study does not account for real world studying. Cornell suggests that students study 4-6hrs every afternoon(3). It is suggested that students study 2 hrs per hour in class(4). 10 minutes is less than 10% of 2 hours. Plus the Study 3 stops accounting for verbatim note-taking as it does for study 2 and the overlap of verbatim note-taking shows that verbatim-note takers, both longhand writers and typers, perform worse when allowed 10 minutes of studying. In fact, Study 3 actually showed that the laptop people who studied the 10 minutes of notes actually performed worse than the laptop people who did not study(1) under table 2 of Study 3. That's not a surprise since Study 3 doesn't simulate or account for real studying. None of the studies are really conducive to bsh1's case. The article that he cites that cited these studies literally made up its own summary of the studies. There is evidence that verbatim-notetaking negatively affects performance, but there is no evidence that really suggests that laptop note-taking is really the problem.Weighed with the growing benefits and potential of laptops in the modern world, I don't think any of these mild inconclusive problems are problematic at all.Sources1 - http://pss.sagepub.com...;2 - http://www.uwgb.edu...;3 - http://www.cornellcollege.edu...;4 - http://www.usu.edu...;Over to Con!