Lectures + Discussion Sections

[Katrina Gulliver]

With ergative on this one. I have had rules of "no laptops" during discussion sections, because I tell them their goal is to engage with each other, not the screen: and they have better conversations like that in a small group. But for lectures, a lot of students take notes electronically, and that's fine - a surprising number though still use paper and pen, which I also find interesting.

(I'm also not for checking anybody's notebooks, that sounds pretty oppressive).

[Hegemony]

I'm sticking with a no-electronics rule, myself. My students tell me that in the big lecture classes, they sit near people who are surfing the web, buying stuff on ebay, and watching porn on their laptops or their phones. Electronics are designed to be distracting. I have enough problems dealing with an 80-minute lecture class without competing with the internet.

[sinenomine]

It saddens me to hear that American undergrads couldn't handle a 80 minute lecture, esp given the likelihood that such a class only meets twice a week in most cases.   It goes without saying that I was horrified to read the poster who suggested that hu's students could not really deal with more than 5 minutes of lecture without interruptions for more interesting activities, activities which seem to be the proper province of junior hs.  Random suggestions include:

1) making sure, at least in freshman classes, that, at the beginning of the semester, students get quick and direct lessons on notetaking, the old fashioned kind with actual pen and paper, and reinforce this requirement by checking notebooks periodically
2) making sure that material lectured upon, at least material that professor emphasizes as important through writing on board and such like, regularly appears on quizzes and tests
3) holding a zero tolerance policy for electronics use in class

Given the decreasing dexterity with handwriting, and the fact that many students are actually extremely effective in note-taking with digital devices (e.g., downloading lecture slides in advance and annotating them directly during lecture), to say nothing of disabilities accommodations, I think this is a losing battle that, even if won, would not actually benefit our students.

In my freshman writing classes, I share some studies about the neuroscience behind writing notes rather than typing (including writing with a digital stylus), and so far I've seen a steady 50/50 split between those who hand write and those who type. The same ratio has been consistent for those who do their rough drafts of assignments by hand rather than typed.

[Caracal]

It saddens me to hear that American undergrads couldn't handle a 80 minute lecture, esp given the likelihood that such a class only meets twice a week in most cases.   It goes without saying that I was horrified to read the poster who suggested that hu's students could not really deal with more than 5 minutes of lecture without interruptions for more interesting activities, activities which seem to be the proper province of junior hs.  Random suggestions include:

I mostly lecture and it's fine, so I wouldn't say things are that dire. When things are going well, however, my lectures are always pretty interactive. I ask questions as we go, including some pretty open ended ones to try to get at least a bit of discussion going and set up some of the questions we are looking at. When there's reading, we discuss it where it fits in. I encourage students to break in with questions and am perfectly happy to get sidetracked by something the students are interested in. I don't really love group work, but it can be useful to break stuff up and get different people involved as the semester goes on.

I never teach classes bigger than 50, however, and I do think a lot of this can be harder for a 100 person class. Talking starts to seem like a public performance for the students, so I would try to incorporate more group work just to allow more people to get involved.

[OneMoreYear]

Most of my students use their laptops to take notes, but I have one student this year who is using one of this Rocketbook smart notebooks to take notes by hand, then upload them electronically. This student's handwriting is amazingly legible; i don't know if the system would work with my horrid handwriting, but I'm tempted to get one and try it out. Has anyone ever tried one?

Interestingly, I don't often see "use of laptop" in my disability accommodations letters (almost every letter this year was the ability to audio record classes and extended time on exams), but I wonder if that is because I don't think anyone in my department uses a laptop ban.

kaysixteen, I would be surprised there would be many higher-ed professors using notebook checking (if you are referencing the actual checking of the notebook and not a quiz that is open-notebook), particularly in large lecture courses. I think the last time I had anyone check my notebooks was freshman year of high school. I always failed that assignment due to lack of organization, but aced the class (intro Latin) anyway.

I'm not sure if it's typical, but I was funded by a teaching assistantship in grad school, so I taught discussion/recitation sections starting my 1st semester of grad school (we typically started with intro courses, but you could be assigned any course department-wide, regardless of how related that course was to your emphasis). After we obtained our masters, we taught our own courses, without any additional training.

[Ruralguy]

I agree with Ergative. I know a few years ago there were some limited studies (I have no idea what was even published, just one of those things that got passed around) that showed that manual notes led to better results in testing than digital.  However, we're losing that battle more and more every day. Be ready to fail nearly everyone on the assignment if you do this (we require it for advanced physical sciences labs and many still write nothing...of course a few never accomplish anything anyway, but that's a different story. We're in process of switching to digital notebooks for lab.

[Puget]

I agree with Ergative. I know a few years ago there were some limited studies (I have no idea what was even published, just one of those things that got passed around) that showed that manual notes led to better results in testing than digital.  However, we're losing that battle more and more every day. Be ready to fail nearly everyone on the assignment if you do this (we require it for advanced physical sciences labs and many still write nothing...of course a few never accomplish anything anyway, but that's a different story. We're in process of switching to digital notebooks for lab.

Those studies didn't really replicate well. It turns out (surprise surprise) to be more complicated than that-- different modalities are best for different types of notes. Most people these days can type much faster and more comfortably than they can write by hand, so I would never bar laptops from my classroom. If they choose to do things that are distracting to themselves instead of taking notes, that's really their business, so long as they don't distract those seated around them.

[ergative]

I agree with Ergative. I know a few years ago there were some limited studies (I have no idea what was even published, just one of those things that got passed around) that showed that manual notes led to better results in testing than digital.  However, we're losing that battle more and more every day. Be ready to fail nearly everyone on the assignment if you do this (we require it for advanced physical sciences labs and many still write nothing...of course a few never accomplish anything anyway, but that's a different story. We're in process of switching to digital notebooks for lab.

Those studies didn't really replicate well. It turns out (surprise surprise) to be more complicated than that-- different modalities are best for different types of notes. Most people these days can type much faster and more comfortably than they can write by hand, so I would never bar laptops from my classroom. If they choose to do things that are distracting to themselves instead of taking notes, that's really their business, so long as they don't distract those seated around them.

I also suspect the passage of time has something to do with the replication failures. Studies published in 2015 or earlier were probably testing college students in 2013 or so, which means those students learned their classroom skills ca 2000-2005. Not too many laptops in elementary schools in 2000, so they probably got pretty formative grounding with pencil and paper. That could well have produced a genuine advantage for handwritten notes. But students in 2022 were in elementary schools in 2012, and things got real digital real fast in the last ten years, so I bet a lot of our current students and our future students will have learned to take notes by typing, which means they haven't just become more comfortable typing than writing, but they will always have been more comfortable typing than writing.

(please note: I have literally no expertise in this particular area, unlike puget who seems familiar with the actual research. I'm simply pontificating on the internet, which is, after all, what it's for.)

[Puget]

I agree with Ergative. I know a few years ago there were some limited studies (I have no idea what was even published, just one of those things that got passed around) that showed that manual notes led to better results in testing than digital.  However, we're losing that battle more and more every day. Be ready to fail nearly everyone on the assignment if you do this (we require it for advanced physical sciences labs and many still write nothing...of course a few never accomplish anything anyway, but that's a different story. We're in process of switching to digital notebooks for lab.

Those studies didn't really replicate well. It turns out (surprise surprise) to be more complicated than that-- different modalities are best for different types of notes. Most people these days can type much faster and more comfortably than they can write by hand, so I would never bar laptops from my classroom. If they choose to do things that are distracting to themselves instead of taking notes, that's really their business, so long as they don't distract those seated around them.

I also suspect the passage of time has something to do with the replication failures. Studies published in 2015 or earlier were probably testing college students in 2013 or so, which means those students learned their classroom skills ca 2000-2005. Not too many laptops in elementary schools in 2000, so they probably got pretty formative grounding with pencil and paper. That could well have produced a genuine advantage for handwritten notes. But students in 2022 were in elementary schools in 2012, and things got real digital real fast in the last ten years, so I bet a lot of our current students and our future students will have learned to take notes by typing, which means they haven't just become more comfortable typing than writing, but they will always have been more comfortable typing than writing.

(please note: I have literally no expertise in this particular area, unlike puget who seems familiar with the actual research. I'm simply pontificating on the internet, which is, after all, what it's for.)

It's possible, though there were studies finding the opposite (laptop notes superior) published just a couple years later, so I don't think cohort effects can fully explain it. Lots of things fail to replicate, and that original study was published just before the field really started grappling with that fact and adjusting research practices to try to make results more replaceable and robust.

Here's a failure to (for the most part) replicate, which also discusses other work failing to replicate these effects: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-019-09468-2/

As the authors note, distraction from doing other things on a laptop is really a separate question from whether they are more or less effective for taking notes. I think we'd be much better off talking to students about avoiding distraction (which they know happens) than trying to convince them that there is something superior about taking notes on paper (which often doesn't accord with their personal experience and  just makes the professor seem like an antiquated dinosaur).

[kaysixteen]

Checking notebooks would be a pain in the ass, yes, and I do not want to have to do it.

But I do have responsibilities as a professor, one big one of which is to see to it that the students learn, or at least have the best chance of learning, the material.   I cannot do this if I essentially surrender to the computerization mentality, because, well, even if students say they are going to use the computer to take notes, and some actually more or less do do so, the damn things are just too distracting, and too tempting to misuse.   No grazie.

And a real-world exercise would include the old-fashioned skill of paper and pen, well-organized and formatted notes.

[Hegemony]

I'm also open to more suggestions about what to do to engage students in the 80-minute period aside from droning on delivering information.

[downer]

I will be teaching a class of first-year students this fall, 80 minutes twice a week. An intro course, fairly technical material, gen ed. I suspect I will end up doing quite a lot of droning on. It probably is not ideal for the students. But there are various forces that keep things that way.

Walking around during classes, it is clear that droning on is by far the most common method of teaching. There's no institutional support for other approaches.

Organizing group work is generally hard to do and I've rarely seen it be very useful.

Maybe I will try to make class a bit more interactive, with student polls, for example. It's often a fair amount of work to plan those out. If I knew for sure that I will be teaching the same course for the next few years, I'd be more ready to invest the time. But I have no such guarantee.

In other classes I get students to do presentations, but in this one, I suspect that there are more students who won't have relevant skills, and the material does not lend itself easily to student presentations.

[apl68]

I'm sticking with a no-electronics rule, myself. My students tell me that in the big lecture classes, they sit near people who are surfing the web, buying stuff on ebay, and watching porn on their laptops or their phones. Electronics are designed to be distracting. I have enough problems dealing with an 80-minute lecture class without competing with the internet.

And that gets to the reason why it's not enough to just take an "if they want to waste their time surfing the 'net during lecture it's their own business" approach.  This behavior is creating distractions for neighboring students who may be trying to concentrate on the lecture.  In the case of porn watching, it may also be creating what some neighboring students consider a hostile environment.

[mamselle]

A friend whose classes I visited from time to time, teaching American history in a business-school setting, motivated students by, A) polling them on a 4-answer multiple-guess question at 3-4 random points during the class (lo-tech, baseball hatches against each possible letter on the board, a larger class you'd maybe use a doc cam for the same thing), and giving the right answer afterwards, with brief discussion to follow ("...why did you think c," etc), and the B) reminded them it would be--in some form, answer order swapped, etc.-- on the next class day's opening quiz--there was always a 5-point, 4-question quiz (1 point for your name, which also yielded the attendance list for the day)...and then did so.

This kept attendance up, got them reading and thinking, and some number, 2 or 3, I think, of the lowest scores were dropped, since there were too many, anyway...the average totaled into their class points overall, as I recall.

They had the formulas set up in Excel, so little grade work was needed, since they used the same format for all the courses they taught (global history, civics, history of American documents, business history,, etc.).

Might be useful in some ways.

M.

[Hegemony]

That is very ingenious, Mamselle — thanks!