As it has for the past 8 or 9 years, the Office of Professional Development has sponsored Summer Tuesdays (initially these began as Tech Tuesdays and were organized by the Educational Technologist). These are simply informal gatherings in the Principal’s Conference Room of any teacher who wants to work on their own curriculum alongside others doing the same. Yosup Joo and I make up the psychology “department” and make it a point to meet at these gatherings and talk through our curriculum and our instruction. Based on part of this week’s conversation with him, I sent the following tweet which has garnered several DMs and even an email from another school:
We’re banning devices during lectures this year » Laptop Multitasking Hinders Classroom Learning for Both Users and Nearby Peers https://t.co/VQcBINWeSD
— Eric Castro (@eecastro)July 31, 2018
To clarify, by “we” I meant Mr Joo and I… not the school.
Our decision was based on on the study linked in the tweet. First, the multitasking which regularly occurs when students are on an electronic device during lecture reduces their own performance on an assessment of the material covered during that lecture by 11% (see figure 1 below). Frankly, if students make a conscious choice to reduce their own learning by 11% by insisting on using a device during lectures, I have in the past accepted that decision and allowed them the freedom to do that. However, it is the second part of the study that finally convinced us to ban devices during lecture: the use of a laptop by someone within view reduces a non-multitasking student’s performance by 17%. The authors explain the difference thus:
Multitaskers appear to have been able to time their multitasking activities in a manner that reduced distraction to some degree. Those in view of multitasking appear to have been lured into watching other students’ laptop screens even during inopportune moments of the lecture, thus creating worse learning for those in view of a multitasker compared to the actual person who was multitasking.
As such, students will be required to have a simple composition book for psychology, and they’ll need to take lecture notes in that instead of on a laptop or iPad.
This might strike some as ironic, since I was the architect of our one-to-one iPad program, but I have always argued for the right technology for the learning activity. Sometimes that necessitates a browser and the Internet, and other times it necessitates a more analog solution — such as paper and pen.