STUDENTS, DROP THAT LAPTOP.

Step into any college lecture hall and you are likely to find a sea of students typing away at open, glowing laptops as the professor speaks. But a growing body of evidence shows that over all, college students learn less when they use computers or tablets during lectures. They also tend to earn worse grades. The research is unequivocal: Laptops distract from learning, both for users and for those around them. It's not much of a leap to expect that electronics also undermine learning in school class rooms or that they hurt productivity in workplace meetings. Measuring the effect of laptops on learning is tough. One problem is that students don't all use laptops the same way. It might be that dedicated students who tend to earn high grades, use them more frequently in classes. It might be that the most distracted students turn to their laptops whenever they are bored. Researchers can solve that problem by randomly assigning some students to use laptops so that the students who use laptops are comparable in all other ways to those who don't.
In a series of experiments at Princeton University and the University of California, Los Angeles, students were randomly assigned either laptops or pen and paper for note-taking at a lecture. Those who had used laptops had a substantially worse understanding of the lecture, as measured by a standardised test, than those who did not. The researchers hypothesised that, because students can type faster they can write, the lecturers words flowed right to the students' typing fingers without stopping in their brains for substantive processing. Students writing by hand had to process and condense the spoken material simply to enable their pens to keep up with the lecture. Indeed, the notes of the laptop users more closely resembled transcripts than lecture summaries. The handwritten versions were more succinct but included the salient issues discussed in the lecture.
Even so, it may seem heavy-handed to ban electronics in the classroom. Most college students are adults so why shouldn't they decide themselves whether to use a laptop or not.
The strongest argument against allowing that choice is that one student's use of a laptop harms the learning of students around them. In a series of lab experiments, researchers at York University and McMaster University in Canada tested the effect of laptops on students who weren't using them. Some students were told to perform small tasks on their laptops unrelated to the lecture, like looking up movie times. As expected, these students retained less of the lecture material. But what is really interesting is that the learning of students seated near the laptop users was also negatively affected. The economic term for such a spillover is a "negative externality".
-Challpalli Srinivas Chakravarthy-
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