This reminded me of a report on CBC radio a few weeks back on note taking and multi-tasking. They were reporting on a recent study at McMaster. I haven't had a chance to look at the published study, but the CBC summary can be found at http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2013/08/14/technology-laptop-grades.html) The results showed that students taking notes on laptops vs. pen-and-paper did 11% worse on a test they were given after the lecture they were asked to take motes on. Most remarkable was that students who were seated near a student who was multi-tasking on their laptop did 17% worse than students not distracted. And those students did not even realize that they were being distracted ( they did not report feeling distracted on the exit survey). This seems like strong evidence in favour of banning laptops from lectures (or at the very least making them sit at the back where no one else can see). Evan Sent from my iPhone.
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