Why students using laptops learn less in class even when they really are taking notes
Are you one of those old-school types who insists that kids learn better when they leave the laptops at home and take lecture notes in longhand?
If so, you’re right. There’s new evidence to prove it, and it’s unsettling because so many students aren’t really taught longhand anymore.
According to a new study based on a series of lab-based experiments comparing how much students learned after listening to the same lectures, there’s no contest. Handwriters learn better, hands down.
The ones who took their notes in longhand demonstrated in tests that they got more out of the lectures than the typists.
It’s not for the reasons most people think either. It’s not because of “multi-tasking” or the distraction available to students using laptops, especially with WiFi. That’s a problem by itself. But for this study, in a lab setting, no extraneous activity was allowed.
