Students Are Better off without a Laptop in the Classroom

Megalith

Megalith

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Some believe that classroom laptops are mere distractions, and new research is proving it. Scientists at Michigan State University tracked and evaluated the time that students spent online, the specific sites they visited, and the number of different requests sent to the server each session: participants spent almost 40 minutes out of every 100-minute class period using the internet for nonacademic purposes (e.g., social media, checking email, shopping), but less than 5 minutes on average using the internet for class-related purposes.

Although computer use during class may create the illusion of enhanced engagement with course content, it more often reflects engagement with social media, YouTube videos, instant messaging, and other nonacademic content. This self-inflicted distraction comes at a cost, as students are spending up to one-third of valuable (and costly) class time zoned out, and the longer they are online the more their grades tend to suffer.
 
I remember bringing a laptop with me to one of my CS classes. I just played (the original) Colonization.
 
I was amazed when I started law school in 2005 at how many people had laptops in the class. That concept was totally foreign to me, I was a pad and paper guy. No one in my undergrad had a laptop during class. Once I started bringing my own laptop I totally just zoned out on the internet the whole time.

Now it seems like laptops in class are the norm. Crazy.
 
Try this same test in an AP Chem class and you will get different results. In College, we had laptops more than 15yrs ago and we still focused on taking notes and the classes at hand. As we were paying for them.
 
Did it affect their grades much? In high school, I was distracted a lot. I didn't do my homework. I did very well on the tests. I was bored. I knew the material, I just didn't want to sit through 60 minutes of them slowly explaining it. If I didn't know the material, I was more engaged and listening and participating.

In college, I paid a lot more attention. I had to put the laptop away so I could pay more attention.

I guess it depends on the student, what they know, their learning style (maybe they are better at reading the book vs. lecture).

Laptops, cell phones, etc. are easy distractions. It's way too easy to click on [H] when you should be working.... shit.
 
jeremyshaw said:
If the classes had any actual useful content or reason for existing, this problem would largely solve itself.
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:rolleyes:

Ur_Mom said:
Did it affect their grades much? In high school, I was distracted a lot. I didn't do my homework. I did very well on the tests. I was bored. I knew the material, I just didn't want to sit through 60 minutes of them slowly explaining it. If I didn't know the material, I was more engaged and listening and participating.

In college, I paid a lot more attention. I had to put the laptop away so I could pay more attention.

I guess it depends on the student, what they know, their learning style (maybe they are better at reading the book vs. lecture).

Laptops, cell phones, etc. are easy distractions. It's way too easy to click on [H] when you should be working.... shit.
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I was the same way in college. Really had to put myself into focus mode to get stuff done.

I only used my laptop to take notes because my handwriting sucks so much I couldn't read what I wrote even a couple hours later. I made it a point to have Word open and nothing else. I'd also disable my WiFi for distraction purposes and to save battery life.
 
Surface or an iPad Pro would be my goto for class notes. As well as bluetooth glasses to record the lecture/lab and a voice recorder.

...
 
Megalith said:
Some believe that classroom laptops are mere distractions, and new research is proving it. Scientists at Michigan State University tracked and evaluated the time that students spent online, the specific sites they visited, and the number of different requests sent to the server each session: participants spent almost 40 minutes out of every 100-minute class period using the internet for nonacademic purposes (e.g., social media, checking email, shopping), but less than 5 minutes on average using the internet for class-related purposes.

Although computer use during class may create the illusion of enhanced engagement with course content, it more often reflects engagement with social media, YouTube videos, instant messaging, and other nonacademic content. This self-inflicted distraction comes at a cost, as students are spending up to one-third of valuable (and costly) class time zoned out, and the longer they are online the more their grades tend to suffer.
Click to expand...


Aww hell. I slept through half my classes and was reading paperback novels during most of the others. The only times I was actively engaged was when my teacher actually had us involved in things as a group. I knocked out homework when I had to and didn't put much effort into it, and most of my learning was from teachers who were lecturing. Now this was a long time ago, in the 70s for Jr High and High School. But that's the truth of it, I just didn't have to work that hard to pass, minimum effort earned me Bs, and if the subject actually interested me, getting an A was easy. I never thought of myself as exceptionally brilliant so I think it's safe to say the bar was set pretty low in those times.

Now we come along to today and I hear that they have raised the bar quite far from those old days. Maybe they have. I suppose if classes are lasting for 100 minute periods, better than an hour and a half in a single class?, then something is certainly different. But expecting kids to remain engaged for any great length of time, well I think teachers would need to be one part educator and three parts entertainer to pull that off. I wonder, how much of that time "browsing" was actually just an open browser connected to a site while the student listens to something going on in the classroom, like maybe the teacher? I mean, if students are fucking off for 40 minutes out of every 100, does that line up with the teacher not being engaged with the class as well?

Being logged into a site doesn't mean the brain is on the site and not on the teacher. I think this study is relying on incomplete data to form an opinion.
 
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PaulP said:
Captain Obvious strikes again. I'm glad they didn't have laptops when I was in college. There were enough distractions (girls) as it was.
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I spent three years after high school getting two years worth of schooling done, almost. Girls, work, all kinds of things conspired to ensure that I was either asleep during my first morning class or involved with something else during the others. I can't say it was tough in class or easy, cause mostly, I didn't really engage .... I coasted. If I like the subject I did fine, if I didn't, then I didn't.

But I was sort of surprised that as I grew older and had many years in the Army behind me, I found that I could do really good work in school. That I could put in some effort pretty easily and actually get something out of it in return. It just serves to reinforce why you don't send kids to college after high school just because it's the next step. If the kid isn't set on what they are going to go do and become, and if they are not really wanting to do well, then they need to do something else for awhile and grow up some. And pay a good bit themselves as well. No blood in the game is a bad idea.
 
uh i dont know. have teachers thought about telling students to stop shopping and start studying?
 
This really annoys me because its not the technology, its the freaking kids. If they didn't have a laptop... like that implies they wouldn't surf on their phone or tablets instead. The reality is kids still have to learn to focus on their own.
 
So basically, same shit different day.

Students back in my days would spend time in classes either texting, sleeping, talking to other people or simply zoning out, and the end result is the same, not paying attention.

The means merely have changed, the actual result have not, they just have focused on different things than we have used to back in our days.
 
To be perfectly honest, I didn't learn that much in my schooling over the years, I learned more on my own from encyclopedias and other materials (mind you this was from roughly 1974-ish through 1985) than I did from the teachers. There were a handful, literally like 5 teachers, that I remember to this day because they truly loved what they did and they made the little learning that actually happened a fun experience. People remember things they can attach fun positive emotions with which is just another part of the reason I remember them specifically and not the dozens upon dozens of others I couldn't recall even if I wanted to at this point.

As for having laptops, if it's a computer science course or something directly related to the actual hands on use of such hardware, fine, if it's most anything else then nope, get 'em outta there.
 
University isn't high school anymore, most of the students are grown adults, they are responsible for what they do with what they have.

Sure, the university still must have rules in place so students don't do stuff that would be illegal outside of their grounds, but I don't think university should ban electronics during class.

As long as the teachers themselves are fine, and they are not distracting other people in the same class, what they do on the said electronic devices are their business, just don't expect the lecturers to be sympathetic to your plights when you flunk it.
 
We used to pass notes, throw pencils into the ceiling, and sleep in class.
 
I know I would have a nice collection of laptops, cell phones, tablets and whatnot to play with from confiscations if I was a teacher that wasn't teaching programming etc. and then they would be school property that would be locked down proper.
 
I went to college awhile ago (Facebook didn't exist!) but even back then most of my classmates seemed to spend the majority of their time playing games or browsing random websites so it's not surprising to know it's just as bad or worse now. A lot of people seem to assume a university/college student will behave responsibly because they are "adults", but that is really the time when they do a lot of really stupid stuff (myself included :p) and hopefully learn from it.


jeremyshaw said:
If the classes had any actual useful content or reason for existing, this problem would largely solve itself.
Click to expand...

I agree with you generally speaking. There is a serious lack of reasoning/thinking in many college curricula, instead replaced with rote memorization of unimportant facts. I don't think that's the main reason people are screwing around during class though. If the lack of depth in classrooms was the issue there's nowhere you can find more supplemental information than the internet, but that stuff won't be found on Facebook/Amazon/Bejeweled.
 
Working in schools, I see many teachers who use the tech incorrectly giving kids free reign to do what they want. This article is very spot on. However the issue isn't in the tech itself but rather how it is wielded. Those teachers that use it properly can give the kids a real tool that can help impact their learning experience.
 
Generalization that isn't true for everyone. Most probably but not all. For me a laptop was a godsend. I was always able to type very fast, but my handwriting was atrocious. I couldn't hand write legible notes quickly enough to get anything meaningful. Typing ensured I could actually get pages of meaningful notes instead of a few lines of frustration. Perhaps the problem isn't the technology but instead parents not teaching their kids time management and how to separate work from entrainment. For me I always had an entirely different user account that had nothing distracting installed. This way temptation wasn't there. I'm teaching my kids the same thing. They understand that when a task needs to be competed that distractions get put away. They understand that the task gets done faster and with fewer mistakes that way.
 
DrLobotomy said:
I know I would have a nice collection of laptops, cell phones, tablets and whatnot to play with from confiscations if I was a teacher that wasn't teaching programming etc. and then they would be school property that would be locked down proper.
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I know as a parent if you were a teacher of my kids you would be out of a job. It's my job as a parent to teach my kids how to use tools properly. Your only job other than teaching is to inform me if my child is not using said tools properly. What your comment implies is nothing short of theft. If other parents are shitty and can't control their kids that isn't my problem. My child however will not suffer because of Luddite teachers as a result of other parents being worthless.

When I was a student I had one professor try to pull that shit on me. He lost. I was the only one in his class who had a laptop, I also ended up with the highest final grade.
 
I know the article speaks more of the post-secondary environment, but my experience comes from the K-12 environment. As of today, I've been unemployed for two weeks ever since the reform school district that I worked at dissolved and the schools returned to their former school district. Initially when our district was formed, it was created on the basis of a technology-based, student-centered curriculum. This meant laptop carts in every classroom. The elementary/middle school students would break them and the high school students would steal them. Teachers would rarely report thefts and damages as well. They mainly used the laptops as a digital daycare. Overall ACT scores dropped in the district for the first three years until they decided to not have an entirely online curriculum. The state changed the MEAP test from a Scantron to the online MSTEP test. With a lot of the state mandated testing being online tests now, it's hard to remove laptops from classrooms and at $500x30 computers plus the $2000 for the cart to store and charge them in along with the number of laptops needed to meet the 1:1 requirement, it's hard to justify mothballing thousands of dollars of equipment just to use them a few times a year.

One thing for certain, if I'm still working in IT in the future, it won't be in K-12.
 
my surface pro was useful. Notes can be seen anywhere, cant be water damaged.

The other engineers were super jealous when i just copy + pasted when the teacher changed just a few things in a diagram to make a new example.

they either had to ruin the 1st example and make the changes, or try to re-draw it super fast. There were a lot of surface pros when I got out.


People can also goof off on their smartphones (saw a guy in a hard course play some dumb anime phone game in the front row the entire time, in a class of <30), a serious student is a serious student.
 
chenw said:
So basically, same shit different day.

Students back in my days would spend time in classes either texting, sleeping, talking to other people or simply zoning out, and the end result is the same, not paying attention.

The means merely have changed, the actual result have not, they just have focused on different things than we have used to back in our days.
Click to expand...


I think You are correct. I tried to say the same thing in my own meandering ineffective way. You said it much better.

I would say that on most days in school, I learned something.

Then again, what I learned each day while in school, probably took less than 15 minutes to get the point across. Too bad I had to spend 6 hours to get my 15 minutes each day.
 
TheOne5 said:
I know the article speaks more of the post-secondary environment, but my experience comes from the K-12 environment. As of today, I've been unemployed for two weeks ever since the reform school district that I worked at dissolved and the schools returned to their former school district. Initially when our district was formed, it was created on the basis of a technology-based, student-centered curriculum. This meant laptop carts in every classroom. The elementary/middle school students would break them and the high school students would steal them. Teachers would rarely report thefts and damages as well. They mainly used the laptops as a digital daycare. Overall ACT scores dropped in the district for the first three years until they decided to not have an entirely online curriculum. The state changed the MEAP test from a Scantron to the online MSTEP test. With a lot of the state mandated testing being online tests now, it's hard to remove laptops from classrooms and at $500x30 computers plus the $2000 for the cart to store and charge them in along with the number of laptops needed to meet the 1:1 requirement, it's hard to justify mothballing thousands of dollars of equipment just to use them a few times a year.

One thing for certain, if I'm still working in IT in the future, it won't be in K-12.
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Sounds more like a staff training issue than a student problem. Can't blame technology if the people in charge don't know what the fuck they are doing.
 
Dekoth-E- said:
Sounds more like a staff training issue than a student problem. Can't blame technology if the people in charge don't know what the fuck they are doing.
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Sure you can. That's the norm now days. (Least where I work) If managments ideas don't wotk then it must be the employee's faults.

Even when the idea was absurd to begin with and/or little or no training was provided.
 
Private_Ops said:
Sure you can. That's the norm now days. (Least where I work) If managments ideas don't wotk then it must be the employee's faults.

Even when the idea was absurd to begin with and/or little or no training was provided.
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No shit. I'm seeing it right these days.

Dumb ass oh so smart PMP type, has his bird's eye view of how he is going to lead our customer into the new age of cloud computing. Fucking moron.

This guy keeps failing, and now he is starting to point fingers at us for getting in the way of his success. According to him, we are failing the contract, not him, it's us. You want to know what this guy doesn't do? He doesn't get down in the weeds and learn what the customer needs and try to help the customer find solutions, and help the customer recognize his weaknesses and help fix those problems. He thinks transitioning to new tech is the answer to all problems when our customer has basic problems with processes that are not being done effectively.

So you are correct, I'm living it today. Fortunately, when this guy finally does loose the contract for his company, my company who is the sub on it, will win as the prime. We're going to take it away from them if we can. If we blow it, well I'll need a new job. Thems the breaks.
 
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