IB Docs (2) Team
Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014)
One of the most active areas of research today is the study of how technology may affect our cognitive processes - including our memory, thinking and decision making. As more and more schools become "laptop schools" and distance learning becomes a way to take courses from the comfort of your own home, the effectiveness of technology in the support of learning is an open question.
The following study by Mueller and Oppenheimer wanted to see if the act of taking notes by hand would be more effective than taking notes on a computer in a university lecture. This is a good study for the cognitive extension on the positive/negative effects of technology on cognition.
A study by Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014) suggests that using laptops - or other devices - to take notes may actually hinder learning. Their argument is that when we take notes by hand, we cannot write fast enough to "keep up" with the professor; as a result, we have to process information and put what the professor says into our own words in order to get it on paper. This processing helps the learning process better than taking notes on the computer, regardless of how "complete" those computer notes may be.
To test their theory, the researchers used a volunteer sample of 109 UCLA undergraduate students, 27 of whom were male.
Participants were given either a laptop or pen and paper and were instructed to take notes on a series of four lectures. The lectures were films of a graduate student reading from a teleprompter. The lectures had the following themes: bats, bread, vaccines, and respiration.
Participants were told that they would be tested in one week on the content of the lectures - and they would not be allowed to take their notes home with them. Each participant watched the lecture on a private monitor with headphones in order to avoid any distractions.
The two conditions - handwriting and laptop note-taking - were then randomly divided into two more conditions. In the "study" condition, the participants were given 10 minutes to study their notes before being tested. In the "no-study" condition, the participants were immediately tested without a chance to review their notes. There were 40 questions - 10 for each lecture. The questions were categorized by the researchers into "factual" questions and "conceptual" questions.
The results showed that in both the longhand and the laptop conditions, if the participants did not get a chance to study, they did poorly on factual knowledge and did fairly well on conceptual knowledge, although there was no significant difference in performance. A significant difference was found when the participants did get the chance to study. Participants who took notes by hand did significantly better than those that took notes on the computer.
- The study is highly standardized and can be replicated; in this way, we can test the reliability of the findings.
- The study has high mundane reality for students; they are used to hearing lectures and taking notes. However, it could be argued that it has low ecological validity because they do not often take notes on lectures where they are not aware what the topic will be.
- The study is an independent samples design, which means that participant variability may play a role in the differences between the groups' performance.
- The standard deviations are high, meaning that the data may not be highly reliable.
- The study does not have high internal validity; there was a week that passed between the two tests. It was not possible to control for extraneous variables during this time.
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