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I’ve always thought these studies were stupid and lauded mainly by professors who can’t stand that their student’s attention can’t be held captive by their awfu

I’ve always thought these studies were stupid and lauded mainly by professors who can’t stand that their student’s attention can’t be held captive by their awful soapboxing. Just on face value, the quality and type of instruction varies so wildly that this entire conversation is moot. Adults can make their own decisions about knowledge processing.

BitwiseFool 6y ago
I'm certain a person's preference probably creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
fouric 6y ago
> I’ve always thought these studies were stupid Why? I can't see any reason why studies that try to determine which method of note-taking leads to the most knowledge comprehension is "stupid" - in fact, this is one of the most interesting kinds of studies to me, and it's objectively useful given the massive shift towards knowledge-work in the past few decades. > lauded mainly by professors who can’t stand that their student’s attention can’t be held captive by their awful soapboxing. And what does this have to do with the quality of the studies themselves? Ad-hominem. > Adults can make their own decisions about knowledge processing. This is an emotionally-manipulative and irrelevant statement. "Irrelevant" because the given studies made no prescriptive claims about which method to use - they just tried to measure which methods were the most effective.
- ukj 6y ago
  Well, for starters you have to figure out how you measure "comprehension". Seeming as different brains make different space-time trade-offs when representing/retaining knowledge.
  - fouric 6y ago
    ...which is an entirely valid criticism of existing studies - unlike GP's post.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jdgoesmarching 6y ago
  You conveniently skipped the crux of my argument: instruction styles vary so widely that focusing on note-taking tools in a lecture environment is pointless. It’s like asking “which utensil is the best” without establishing the food you’re eating. The premise is ridiculous and clearly driven by a desire to make high-minded statements about analog versus digital methods. I’ve read several of these studies for grad school, and you don’t have to get much further than the abstracts to see how badly academics want to prove this point. Throughout my academic career I’ve seen professors point to these awful studies to justify their class policies. My comment was clearly not just discussing these studies in a vacuum, so I’m not sure why you’re treating it like a peer review.
ryandrake 6y ago
I remember working at a not-to-be-named tech company with a weekly "marching orders" meeting led by an old-school VP who insisted on no-laptops. She'd actually stop the meeting if she saw a laptop open. The meeting was very information-dense. So the notetakers (yes, plural), would spend the whole time frantically scribbling down every word on paper without missing anything. Following this, we all had to then dedicate some time to quickly transcribe these notes digitally into an E-mail anyway which got sent out before the afternoon. It seemed like such a pointless inefficiency, but I suppose nobody wanted to be the one to question whether we could do better.
eszed 6y ago
>lauded mainly by professors who can’t stand that their student’s attention can’t be held captive by their awful soapboxing I spent five years as a university professor, and I did not care at all whether my students were taking notes on their laptops, or trying to multi-task by studying for something else (or even checking their Facebook, or whatever). I know I did the same (studying, not Facebooking; I'm too old for that) when I was a student, and I'd rather have had them in class, no matter where their cost-benefit analysis directed their moment-by-moment attention. If it was a discussion-oriented class, then we arranged chairs in a circle; I sat (very non-hierarchically, lol) in the same circle. No problem there. If it was a more "conventional" classroom setup, then I always asked the laptop-users to sit in the back. This was because I'd observed (our department had us sit in, once per term, on a colleague's class, which was excellent) that students frequently viewed distracting material in class. I don't know which was worse: the dude looking through photos of his girlfriend not-quite-nude, but definitely NSFW; or the girl reviewing for an A&P test, and flipping through really gory human dissection photos. No one needs to see those. I always explained the reason to my students, with those exact examples, and no one ever had a problem -- though I remember sometimes seeing a few red faces on the first day as the laptop-users switched seats. You're totally right, though, about adults making their own decisions about knowledge processing. I always tried to respect students' autonomy to the greatest extent possible. I saw my laptop rule as an important part of that ethos.
- jdgoesmarching 6y ago
  These are completely fair compromises and I wish this attitude was more widespread. The discussion example in particular is why I bring up variability in teaching methods. In that setting, jotting down some occasional ideas is all you might need. Compare that to one of my former professors who quizzed us on his personal anecdotes from lecture and we have a complete different set of needs. These studies annoy me because they insist that lectures are identical and “comprehension” is always poorly defined as some arbitrary exam of how many obscure details were memorized from a Powerpoint. At the end of the day, whether I’m transcribing on a laptop or visually representing ideas with watercolors is less important than how effectively a teacher happens to target my learning style. At some point we need to stop repackaging the Prussian model and insisting on the One True Way™ for students to learn.

BitwiseFool 6y ago

I'm certain a person's preference probably creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.

fouric 6y ago

> I’ve always thought these studies were stupid Why? I can't see any reason why studies that try to determine which method of note-taking leads to the most knowledge comprehension is "stupid" - in fact, this is one of the most interesting kinds of studies to me, and it's objectively useful given the massive shift towards knowledge-work in the past few decades. > lauded mainly by professors who can’t stand that their student’s attention can’t be held captive by their awful soapboxing. And what does this have to do with the quality of the studies themselves? Ad-hominem. > Adults can make their own decisions about knowledge processing. This is an emotionally-manipulative and irrelevant statement. "Irrelevant" because the given studies made no prescriptive claims about which method to use - they just tried to measure which methods were the most effective.

ukj 6y ago
Well, for starters you have to figure out how you measure "comprehension". Seeming as different brains make different space-time trade-offs when representing/retaining knowledge.
- fouric 6y ago
  ...which is an entirely valid criticism of existing studies - unlike GP's post.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jdgoesmarching 6y ago
You conveniently skipped the crux of my argument: instruction styles vary so widely that focusing on note-taking tools in a lecture environment is pointless. It’s like asking “which utensil is the best” without establishing the food you’re eating. The premise is ridiculous and clearly driven by a desire to make high-minded statements about analog versus digital methods. I’ve read several of these studies for grad school, and you don’t have to get much further than the abstracts to see how badly academics want to prove this point. Throughout my academic career I’ve seen professors point to these awful studies to justify their class policies. My comment was clearly not just discussing these studies in a vacuum, so I’m not sure why you’re treating it like a peer review.

ryandrake 6y ago

I remember working at a not-to-be-named tech company with a weekly "marching orders" meeting led by an old-school VP who insisted on no-laptops. She'd actually stop the meeting if she saw a laptop open. The meeting was very information-dense. So the notetakers (yes, plural), would spend the whole time frantically scribbling down every word on paper without missing anything. Following this, we all had to then dedicate some time to quickly transcribe these notes digitally into an E-mail anyway which got sent out before the afternoon. It seemed like such a pointless inefficiency, but I suppose nobody wanted to be the one to question whether we could do better.

eszed 6y ago

>lauded mainly by professors who can’t stand that their student’s attention can’t be held captive by their awful soapboxing I spent five years as a university professor, and I did not care at all whether my students were taking notes on their laptops, or trying to multi-task by studying for something else (or even checking their Facebook, or whatever). I know I did the same (studying, not Facebooking; I'm too old for that) when I was a student, and I'd rather have had them in class, no matter where their cost-benefit analysis directed their moment-by-moment attention. If it was a discussion-oriented class, then we arranged chairs in a circle; I sat (very non-hierarchically, lol) in the same circle. No problem there. If it was a more "conventional" classroom setup, then I always asked the laptop-users to sit in the back. This was because I'd observed (our department had us sit in, once per term, on a colleague's class, which was excellent) that students frequently viewed distracting material in class. I don't know which was worse: the dude looking through photos of his girlfriend not-quite-nude, but definitely NSFW; or the girl reviewing for an A&P test, and flipping through really gory human dissection photos. No one needs to see those. I always explained the reason to my students, with those exact examples, and no one ever had a problem -- though I remember sometimes seeing a few red faces on the first day as the laptop-users switched seats. You're totally right, though, about adults making their own decisions about knowledge processing. I always tried to respect students' autonomy to the greatest extent possible. I saw my laptop rule as an important part of that ethos.

jdgoesmarching 6y ago
These are completely fair compromises and I wish this attitude was more widespread. The discussion example in particular is why I bring up variability in teaching methods. In that setting, jotting down some occasional ideas is all you might need. Compare that to one of my former professors who quizzed us on his personal anecdotes from lecture and we have a complete different set of needs. These studies annoy me because they insist that lectures are identical and “comprehension” is always poorly defined as some arbitrary exam of how many obscure details were memorized from a Powerpoint. At the end of the day, whether I’m transcribing on a laptop or visually representing ideas with watercolors is less important than how effectively a teacher happens to target my learning style. At some point we need to stop repackaging the Prussian model and insisting on the One True Way™ for students to learn.