So, in this series of videos, we're going to be looking at one very interesting research paper each video. And today we look at this paper, the pen is mightier. This is a very good paper, as you will see, it's very well written. This paper was published in 2014, which means it was probably submitted a year before, which means the empirical work was probably done couple years before that, somewhere in the early 2010's. The first sentence of this paper is this. The use of laptops in classrooms is controversial, and if you remember in the early 2010s there was a big debate as to whether students should be allowed to use laptops in class. So, in 2010 I was a junior lecture in a university, and we had exactly this debate. Should we allow students to use laptop in class because it could be very distracting. The student might have multiple web pages open; they might have their chat open with messages coming in with emails popping up. It could be very distracting for the student itself and it could be distracting for his fellow students. So there really was this big, complicated discussion back then concerning whether or not laptops should be allowed in classrooms. Because obviously it also depends on the type of class. Is it a lecture or is it discussion class? How big is the class? Was the subject matter? What would the students use, a laptop, for, etc. etc. There were many factors and variables in this debate. Now this paper says we're not going to even bother with issues concerning multitasking or distraction. Let's just simply focus on the effectiveness of notetaking. Let's say the laptop has no other applications on their, the laptop has no Internet connection and all that the student can do with the laptop is to take notes. Should that be allowed. In other words, does having a laptop help students take better notes. Compared to take notes longhand with pen and paper. So that was the question: This paper set out to investigate. And they did so through three experimental studies. The first experiment is very straightforward. The second one was a little bit more complex, and the third experiment was even more complicated. So, there was a very nice build up. So, in the first experiment, very simply put, the researchers ask a bunch of college students to watch a relatively long Ted Talk and the students were asked to take notes. This splits the students into two conditions, those taking notes longhand with pen and paper, and those taking notes on a laptop. And after watching the Ted Talks and taking notes, the students are given distracter tasks to distract them and to make them think about something else. These distracter tasks would last 30 minutes. And after that the students are given a test about the Ted Talk that they watched and took notes off. And this test includes both factual questions and conceptual questions. Factual questions are about remembering, where recalling facts from the lecture or the Ted talk, and the conceptual questions are about understanding the substance of lecture, you would need to be able to explain things or understand why and how type of questions. And here is the result. So, for factual questions, there was no stitches to difference between the two conditions. But for conceptual questions, those students who took notes longhand with pen and paper did significantly better than those who took notes with a laptop. Now, why is that? To explore why there was this difference, the researchers analyzed the textual notes. And one of the things that they found is that those students who took notes with a laptop because you can type quite fast tended to engage in verbatim transcription. In other words, students taking notes with the laptop, which is simply type out exactly and literally what the Ted Talk was talking about. Longhand notetakers don't do that because you cannot write as fast as you can type. So if you are taking notes by hand, you are listening to the presenter, you have to understand what is being talked about and then you have to write it down in your own words. In other words, one would have to re-code that information into their own notes. So, the researchers thought this verbatim transcription is probably the reason why laptop notetakers do not do as well as longhand notetakers in answering conceptual questions. So, the researchers designed a second study. In this second study, they added one more condition to the experiment. So, there are three groups of students now. You have the group of students taking notes longhand with pen and paper as the first group, you have the group of students taking notes with laptops, that's the second group. And then you have one more group of students taking notes with laptops, but they are specifically told not to take verbatim notes. So, don't transcribe verbatim and now let's take a look at the results for this second experiment. So, for factual questions once again there were no statistical differences. What we can see a little bit of difference in some ups and downs, but these differences are not statistically significant. For conceptual questions, however, the longhand note takers did significantly better than laptop note takers with verbatim transcription. But the difference between longhand notetakers and laptop note takers told not to engage in verbatim transcription is not significant. And the two laptop groups, so between those with and those without verbatim notes they did not exhibit statistically significant difference. So, this is actually also interesting and potentially meaningful finding. Because longhand notetakers did significantly better than laptop notetakers with verbatim transcription. But not significantly better than laptop notetakers told not to engage in verbatim transcription. But at the same time, however, laptop note takers told not to take verbatim notes, did not do significantly better than laptop note takers who did take verbatim notes. Why is that? While subsequent content analysis showed that among the students who were told not to take verbatim notes while they still took a lot of verbatim notes. So, it would appear that laptop note takers tendency to transcribe verbatim is simply very strong, which is another interesting piece of finding from the second experiment. Finally, the researchers did a third experiment, which used a 2x2 designs, so four different groups. In the first two experiments that test subjects did not have the opportunity to review their notes prior to taking the test. In other words, you would watch the lecture, you take your notes, you would have the distractor tasks, and then you take the test directly. But in this third experiment they built into the design the opportunity for some subjects to reread or review and study the notes prior to taking the test. So, there are four groups, so the four groups are as follows. There are the laptop notetakers who are given the opportunity to study the notes prior to the test. There are laptop notetakers who are not given the opportunity to study the notes prior to the test. There are longhand notetakers who are given the opportunity to just study the notes before the test, and there are longhand notetakers who are not given the opportunity to study the notes before the test. And here are the results. Oh, by the way, in this third experiment, the time between the note taking and the test was one week. Whereas in the first two experiments, the test followed the note taking almost right away, there were like 30 minutes of distractor an additional tasks. But in this third experiment there was actually a whole week in between, which is more realistic. So here are the results. And as you can see, the general pattern shows that the group which did the best was those who took notes longhand, and with the opportunity to study their notes prior to the test. So let me just read their results here: “Participants who took longhand notes and or able to study them performed significantly better than participants in any of the other conditions”. And that was really the key finding here from this third experiment. So, looking at this paper as a whole, what are their biggest conclusions? And what is the lesson that we can take away from here? Well, take notes longhand with pen and paper and review the notes before you need to use that information. So, this really is a very interesting paper, is very well written, and the way that they built up the three experiments was just very nice. And it's also very nice that he combined the experimental design, which is a quantitative approach with content analysis. So, analyzing the textual data from the notes. It's a great paper, it's very interesting to read, and if you consider the fact that this paper was published in early 2010s when this topic was very prominent in many universities and colleges. This paper was also very timely, so very good paper. And personally, I do value the key take away here. Take notes longhand with pen and paper, and there you go. That's the paper that I wanted to share with you today.
