Close the laptop and take a pen!

The learning process in the form in which we have seen it hundreds of years, living out the last years. Today, students can learn directly from the house, now a teacher lost their monopoly on knowledge, today there is absolutely no need to conduct these thick lecture notes. Everything takes on our dear friend - the computer. However, it is a good thing really?

More recently, the management of abstracts was the direct responsibility of each student. The ability to quickly, accurately and legibly write valued no less, and perhaps even more than the analytical mind and good memory. Then came laptops, smartphones, tablets, and the need to maintain seemingly abstract disappeared. Indeed, why produce those funny scribbles on paper, when you have access to all the knowledge of the world?

However, not all so simple. The ointment of modern educational technology is hidden and a large fly in the ointment. And more and its taste becomes more tangible. For example, the recent Canadian study It says that in those schools where stopped using paper and pens, knowledge of students are much lower.

two identical lectures were held in the course of the experiment. Listeners first active use of laptops and received additional tasks surf the internet associated with the subject information. In the second lecture, students use only pens and notebooks to record the main points.

Students using laptops and multitask, showed 11% lower results, and evaluation of their changed from B + to B-.

But even more interesting results were obtained in a mixed class, one of the students who use a laptop, and the other - the traditional notes. In this case, students progress with notebooks fell by as much as 17%! It turns out that laptops do not help their owners, but also to prevent others?

Together with Canadian researchers and their colleagues from Princeton University. In their experiment tested students memorize the material used for note-taking laptops, and those without them. While in the first case, students are usually recorded faster memory have remained much less.

Regardless of when the testing was carried out - immediately after the occupation or a week, the students take notes by hand, to cope with the task better.

Scientists attribute this to the fact that when typing on a laptop a student makes, in general, mechanical work, carrying out, in fact, the role of the typist. While his classmates with a pencil in hand have much more room for creativity and abstraction. They may make sketches, add comments in the margins, to introduce its own system of notation, and so on. Thus, while in some work mainly fingers, and others included in the brains-taking process.

These and other similar studies show similar results. Therefore, today no one is not surprising pervasive tendency among teachers to ban the use of laptops and tablets in his lectures.

Close the laptop and take a pen!

Mark Bauerlyayn

It is a phrase you'll hear the beginning of each lecture Mark Bauerlyayn (Mark Bauerlein), Emory University professor and author of "The most stupid generation: how digital age threatens our future." According to him, lecture recording of the hand is much more time consuming process, so students necessary to more deeply analyze the material and record only what is truly important and needed. In his article He encourages his colleagues to the extent possible to forbid students to use laptops and tablets during the lectures.

Yes, it goes against the general trend in the widespread introduction of high technologies in the learning process and is somewhat conservative. Yes, some students will be indignant, because it can be slow and difficult. But in the end it will help them gain a deeper understanding and easier to pass examinations.

Mark Bauerlyayn

And how do you feel about such a ban? Help you think, digital gadgets tuition or hinder?