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How to Write Like An Architect (+ Worksheet)

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Oh yeah - then how do you explain traffic lights, warning signs, and rainbows? Color is important, and it's time we pay attention to color in eLearning too. Not convinced? What If we told you that

Learning is a difficult field to understand, and there's so much research out there discussing these issues that it's hard to know where to begin. What's pretty obvious though is that color plays a key role in creating an environment that fosters learning.

So let's talk about color - What colors help learning? What colors might be annoying or distracting to online learners? And how can we mitigate that risk? That's what we'll be delving into here.

color, as part of the electromagnetic spectrum , is in its purest form energy, a wavelength, which has its own magnetic frequency? What if we told you that colors can affect neurological pathways in the brain? And that they can create a biochemical response? Now, facing that evidence, it's clear that color has been overlooked for far too long. Dr. Robert Gerard recognizes this and has pioneered research, which suggests that every color has a specific wavelength, and each of these affect our body and brain in a different way. Using the right color, and the correct selection and placement can seriously affect feelings, attention, and behavior when learning. It's time that we leveraged that to our advantage. Even research with Alzheimer's patients has shown that color cues improve memory and that learners recall images in color more easily than images in black and white - amazing, right?

Now listen, we're not expecting you to be the next Picasso- but a fundamental understanding of which colors work will benefit your eLearning to no end. So that's what we're going to do now. We'll be going through the colors and having a look at what they mean to you and your learners - and the biological response they can elicit. Bear in mind of course, that this isn't a definitive science. It might be that you're scared of blue because you're scared of water - there are unique elements to color choice. But what we're going for here is a broad-strokes approach that helps us appeal to the most learners with the right colors for our projects. Okay, boilerplate done, let's begin.
Read more: The Complete Guide to Color Combinations in eLearning
You probably know this already, just by taking a look at a forest or a field. Low wavelength colors promote restfulness and calm, and they improve efficiency and focus.

So that's why green is an excellent color for improving concentration. Apart from being one of the easiest colors on the eyes, it reminds us of nature. That's why TV stars stay in the 'green room'. It's a relaxing space.

Green is a good color for keeping long-term concentration and clarity, making it a good choice for an office - as opposed to red, which is seen as stimulating and exciting. Maybe it helps in the short term, but stimulation has to tail off sometimes.

Interestingly enough, there's some real scientific evidence for this. Some studies have shown that people who work in green offices have higher rates of job satisfaction, and consumers have been shown to spend more time shopping in stores that are painted green [1].

Another study, led by Dr. Kate Lee, examined 150 university students. She gave the group a boring, monotonous task that dragged their attention span to a breaking point, pressing a series of numbers over and over as they read off a computer screen. The students were told not to press keys when the number three appeared on the screen. Then break time came, and in a 40-second window half of the group viewed a green roof, while the others looked out onto a bare concrete roof. Amazingly, the research showed that students who looked at the green view made fewer errors and had overall better concentration. [2]

Dr. Lee hypothesizes that the green roof provided a 'restorative experience' which helped boost the mental resources of the students involved in the study. If true, that's a major consideration. If your learners are tired and bored of their compliance material, add in a restorative green screen, a forest scene, or something else for a bit of a break. Lee believes that just a moment of looking at a green space could provide a moment of revitalization for workers who were struggling to concentrate.

Think about the orange sun setting over the horizon. Nice, right? It's true, orange can be a welcoming and mood-lifting color for learners, which in turn promotes comfort and improves neural functioning.

Some theorists argue that an environment rich in the color orange increases the oxygen supply to the brain, stimulating mental activity while simultaneously loosening peoples' inhibitions. An increased oxygen supply also leads to feeling invigorated and getting ready to 'get things done.' Some have even suggested that test centers be painted orange to stimulate exam-takers. The secrets of orange were known in ancient China too - in Feng Shui, orange is seen as a "yang" color which stimulates focus and promotes organization [3]. Of course, we need to remember that

But this comes at a cost - avoid bolder orange colors if your learners are young and naturally energetic. This isn't a good color for those prone to overstimulation as well, for instance if your group of learners have attention deficit hyperactive disorder or another health concern which leads to easy overstimulation.

That's not it on the science for orange, though - many studies have found that when colors are used to emphasize a feature or piece of content on the screen, learners' attention levels increase. Of course, the best colors for this are warm colors, like orange. So we can say that when you're looking to highlight certain facts or important information, orange can be a better choice than the traditional red. But, because of its energy and brightness, orange can be an overwhelming choice. Orange is, in other words, best in small doses.

brightness and saturation also come into it, and too bright a color will probably give you a headache! Looking to the experts, color psychologist Angela Wright states that bright orange hues stimulate while low saturation is more soothing. So for boosting energy, go bold, and for relaxing, go mellow. Makes sense, huh? So to close out orange as a color, in eLearning courses it can be used to highlight key facts and figures, communicate energy, life, and activity. Orange is a vibrant color that demands attention, giving it an edge as a choice for highlighting. But again, use with caution!
Read more: Color Psychology: Use Warm Hues to Energize Your eLearning
Some research suggests that people with highly intellectual work, which requires a high cognitive load, for instance, programmers or academics, are Blue is best used for learning situations which are challenging. Blue paper, blue ink, or blue highlighting can be used to help improve reading comprehension too. Blue in general it seems is a relaxing and calming color, but more productive in a blue environment. That said, though; we can't keep life too monochromatic - it should be balanced with warmer colors. These can be found by using the opposite side of the color wheel.

lighter shades will seem more 'friendly' while darker ones seem a little more somber.

Back to the experts, many color psychologists recommend using blue colors, but adding a bit of extra kick with orange, especially for highlighting information (like we mentioned earlier!).

So in summary, blue is great for promoting high levels of thought, but too much can create a sense of detachment and coldness.
Read more: Color Psychology: Use Cool Colors to Set Just the Right Mood for Learning
Hopefully, by now you're having a dramatic rethink of the color of your courses, your house, and maybe even your car. That's great - that's what we want. Take note of the lessons above and let us know how you've implemented them in your eLearning courses. Remember, color is fundamental to the human experience. It's a huge part of our lives and our perceptions, and we should leverage that in our eLearning courses.
REFERENCES:
1.Effect of Different Colors on Human Mind and Body http://humannhealth.com/effect-of-different-colors-on-human-mind-and-body/243/8/

2. Seeing green boosts your concentration, research shows. May 25, 2015. http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/seeing-green-boosts-your-concentration-research-shows-20150525-gh8udh.html

3. Best Color For Concentration And Productivity Is Orange http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/18/best-color-concentration_n_3949427.html

4. Brain-Based Learning by Eric Jensen, 2000 (p.54-70)

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How Do Colors Influence Learning? - Shift E-learning

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Color plays a key role in creating an effective eLearning. Learn the impact of colors and how to use them strategically to foster learning. Read Now!

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The Influence of Colour on Memory Performance: A Review

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How Using Color Helps Students Remember Content

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How Using Color Helps Students Remember Content

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The Influence of Colour on Memory Performance: A Review

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Human cognition involves many mental processes that are highly interrelated, such as perception, attention, memory, and thinking. An important and core cognitive process is memory, which is commonly associated with the storing and remembering of environmental ...

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Video - How to Improve Your Print Handwriting | JetPens

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Fine writing instruments, office supplies and art products imported from Japan and Europe. Bestselling brands include Pilot, Uni, and Zebra. Free US domestic shipping for orders over $35!

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Made by WAMS in Sanger 8th Grade

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Reedley High

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Sketchnotes for Classroom: Why, How, and Tips

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MAKE YOUR OWN WHITEBOARD ANIMATIONS. CLICK THE LINK! http://tidd.ly/69da8562 . This is an affiliate link. I earn commission from any sales, so Please Use!

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Adding points to templates.

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8th Grade Example

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Sketcho Frenzy: The Basics of Visual Note-taking

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The book you need to own!
http://rohdesign.com/sketchnotes/

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Teachers use his videos to teach students.
Videos on sketchnoting

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Tap into the power of your visual brain. Sketchnoting is a creative superpower, and I want to help you wield it.Join Verbal to VisualImagine a world where you actually remember and apply the ideas ... Read More

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Fifth-grade students who created some type of art-such as a drawing, writing a rap song, singing a science lesson, or choreographing a dance-that reflected specific classroom lessons, retained science-based knowledge longer than students who didn't make art in the same class, according to a new study from Johns Hopkins University. These interdisciplinary findings support the benefits of broader arts integration into conventional classrooms.

As a specific example, the researchers found that students who memorized and sang a song with lyrics that held science-based lessons remembered the content much longer and with better detail than most classmates who tried to retain textbook content learned by rote without a song. This paper, " The Effects of Arts-Integrated Instruction on Memory for Science Content," was recently published in Trends in Neuroscience and Education.

The main goal of this randomized control trial was to determine if an arts-integrated curriculum had any direct impact on learning. The primary focus was on students' long-term memory for science content in astronomy and life science classes or environmental science and chemistry.

Mariale Hardiman from the JHU School of Education was the first author of this study. "Our study provides more evidence that the arts are absolutely needed in schools. I hope the findings can assuage concerns that arts-based lessons won't be as effective in teaching essential skills," Hardiman said in a statement.

"When we talk about learning, we have to discuss memory. Children forget much of what they learn and teachers often end up reteaching a lot of content from the previous year," Hardiman added. "Here we're asking, how exactly can we teach them correctly to begin with so they can remember more?"

For this study, Hardiman and colleagues from the School of Education and Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins enlisted 350 students from 16 different classrooms in Baltimore, Maryland. The trial was designed to measure retention of science content using arts-integrated science learning in comparison to conventional science instruction that didn't incorporate the arts.

During two sessions that lasted between three to four weeks, students were randomly assigned to one arts-integrated science curriculum and one conventional class. Eleven teachers taught both types of classes. Each fifth-grade student rotated through one arts-integrated class and one conventional class.

As the parent of a sixth grader who attends a private K-8 day school that regularly incorporates drawing into science classes, I can corroborate the benefits of arts-integrated pedagogy on academic learning. This week, my daughter spent two days pouring her artistic passion into creating a detailed topographical map (below) of the "Hydrologic Cycle" for a school project due today.

My daughter is lucky. I'm grateful that she's able to attend a day school that reflects the pedagogical philosophy of my alma mater, Hampshire College. When Julia Child's sister co-founded this K-8 school, their mission was to create a "character-building" learning environment that incorporated the arts and an appreciation for nature into academic lessons. Unfortunately, for many students across the country, budget cuts to arts programs and a lack of appreciation for nature do not reflect these core values.

Notably, the Johns Hopkins researchers found that incorporating the arts into classroom learning was most beneficial to low-achieving students who tended to struggle academically.

This study has some limitations. For example, more research is needed to pinpoint whether the benefits of arts-integrated learning are primarily the result of effective instruction, exposure to the arts in general, specific types of art-based lesson plans, or a combination of these interventions in non-arts-based classroom environments. As a next step, Hardiman plans to work with the researchers and educators involved in this study to fine tune an evidence-based, art-integrated pedagogy that expands on the initial findings of this study.

"Our data suggests that traditional instruction seems to perpetuate the achievement gap for students performing at the lower levels of academic achievement. We also found that students at advanced levels of achievement didn't lose any learning from incorporating arts into classrooms, but potentially gained benefits such as engagement in learning and enhanced thinking dispositions. For these reasons, we would encourage educators to adopt integrating the arts into content instruction," Hardiman concluded.

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Arts-Integrated Pedagogy May Enhance Academic Learning

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Fifth-grade students who created some type of art-such as a drawing, writing a rap song, singing a science lesson, or choreographing a dance-that reflected specific classroom lessons, retained science-based knowledge longer than students who didn't make art in the same class, according to a new study from Johns Hopkins University.

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As laptops become smaller and more ubiquitous, and with the advent of tablets, the idea of taking notes by hand just seems old-fashioned to many students today. Typing your notes is faster - which comes in handy when there's a lot of information to take down. But it turns out there are still advantages to doing things the old-fashioned way.

For one thing, research shows that laptops and tablets have a tendency to be distracting - it's so easy to click over to Facebook in that dull lecture. And a study has shown that the fact that you have to be slower when you take notes by hand is what makes it more useful in the long run.

In the study published in Psychological Science, Pam A. Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the University of California, Los Angeles sought to test how note-taking by hand or by computer affects learning.

"When people type their notes, they have this tendency to try to take verbatim notes and write down as much of the lecture as they can," Mueller tells NPR's Rachel Martin. "The students who were taking longhand notes in our studies were forced to be more selective - because you can't write as fast as you can type. And that extra processing of the material that they were doing benefited them."

Mueller and Oppenheimer cited that note-taking can be categorized two ways: generative and nongenerative. Generative note-taking pertains to "summarizing, paraphrasing, concept mapping," while nongenerative note-taking involves copying something verbatim.

And there are two hypotheses to why note-taking is beneficial in the first place. The first idea is called the encoding hypothesis, which says that when a person is taking notes, "the processing that occurs" will improve "learning and retention." The second, called the external-storage hypothesis, is that you learn by being able to look back at your notes, or even the notes of other people.

Because people can type faster than they write, using a laptop will make people more likely to try to transcribe everything they're hearing. So on the one hand, Mueller and Oppenheimer were faced with the question of whether the benefits of being able to look at your more complete, transcribed notes on a laptop outweigh the drawbacks of not processing that information. On the other hand, when writing longhand, you process the information better but have less to look back at.

For their first study, they took university students (the standard guinea pig of psychology) and showed them TED talks about various topics. Afterward, they found that the students who used laptops typed significantly more words than those who took notes by hand. When testing how well the students remembered information, the researchers found a key point of divergence in the type of question. For questions that asked students to simply remember facts, like dates, both groups did equally well. But for "conceptual-application" questions, such as, "How do Japan and Sweden differ in their approaches to equality within their societies?" the laptop users did "significantly worse."

The same thing happened in the second study, even when they specifically told students using laptops to try to avoid writing things down verbatim. "Even when we told people they shouldn't be taking these verbatim notes, they were not able to overcome that instinct," Mueller says. The more words the students copied verbatim, the worse they performed on recall tests.

And to test the external-storage hypothesis, for the third study they gave students the opportunity to review their notes in between the lecture and test. The thinking is, if students have time to study their notes from their laptops, the fact that they typed more extensive notes than their longhand-writing peers could possibly help them perform better.

But the students taking notes by hand still performed better. "This is suggestive evidence that longhand notes may have superior external storage as well as superior encoding functions," Mueller and Oppenheimer write.

Do studies like these mean wise college students will start migrating back to notebooks?

"I think it is a hard sell to get people to go back to pen and paper," Mueller says. "But they are developing lots of technologies now like Livescribe and various stylus and tablet technologies that are getting better and better. And I think that will be sort of an easier sell to college students and people of that generation."

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Attention, Students: Put Your Laptops Away

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Researchers Pam Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer found that students remember more via taking notes longhand rather than on a laptop. It has to do with what happens when you're forced to slow down.

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The Noun Project

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Noun Project: Free Icons & Stock Photos for Everything

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Noun Project has the most diverse collection of free icons and stock photos. Download SVG and PNG. Over 5 million art-quality icons and free photos.

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Visual Note-Taking for Educators: A Teacher's Guide to Student Creativity

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Visual Note-Taking for Educators: A Teacher's Guide to Student Creativity [Pillars, Wendi] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Visual Note-Taking for Educators: A Teacher's Guide to Student Creativity

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Website on Everything Sketchnoting

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Sketchnoting, in its purest form, is creating a personal visual story as one is listening to a speaker or reading a text. I also believe the interactive notebook, which includes the process of taking…

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High School Bio Class Syllabus

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NGSS sound bites-good to use for notetaking.

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Listenwise | Listening Comprehension Matters

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Listening comprehension matters | Listenwise

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Explore the best podcast lessons for grade-level rigor. Curriculum aligned lessons with literacy & language supports, great for English Learners. Free sign up!

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Want students to remember something? Ask them to draw it.

It's long been known that drawing something helps a person remember it. A new study shows that drawing is superior to activities such as reading or writing because it forces the person to process information in multiple ways: visually, kinesthetically, and semantically. Across a series of experiments, researchers found drawing information to be a powerful way to boost memory, increasing recall by nearly double.

Myra Fernandes, Jeffrey Wammes, and Melissa Meade are experts in the science of memory-how people encode, retain, and recall information. At the University of Waterloo, they conducted experiments to better understand how activities such as writing, looking at pictures, listening to lectures, drawing, and visualizing images affect a student's ability to remember information.

In an early experiment, they asked undergraduate students to study lists of common terms-words like truck and pear -and then either write down or illustrate those words. Shortly afterward, participants recalled 20 percent of words they had written down, but more than twice as many-45 percent-of the terms they had drawn. This experiment helped to establish the benefits of drawing.

In a follow-up experiment, the researchers compared two methods of note-taking-writing words by hand versus drawing concepts-and found drawing to be "an effective and reliable encoding strategy, far superior to writing." The researchers found that when the undergraduates visually represented science concepts like isotope and spore, their recall was nearly twice as good as when they wrote down definitions supplied by the lecturer.

Importantly, the benefits of drawing were not dependent on the students' level of artistic talent, suggesting that this strategy may work for all students, not just ones who are able to draw well.

Across a total of eight experiments, the researchers confirmed drawing to be a "reliable, replicable means of boosting performance"-it provided a significant boost to students' ability to remember what they were learning.

Why is drawing such a powerful memory tool? The researchers explain that it "requires elaboration on the meaning of the term and translating the definition to a new form (a picture)." Unlike listening to a lecture or viewing an image-activities in which students passively absorb information-drawing is active. It forces students to grapple with what they're learning and reconstruct it in a way that makes sense to them.

The researchers also suggest that drawing results in better recall because of how the information is encoded in memory. When a student draws a concept, they "must elaborate on its meaning and semantic features, engage in the actual hand movements needed for drawing (motor action), and visually inspect [the] created picture (pictorial processing)."

At a neural level, the strength of a memory depends largely on how many connections are made to other memories. An isolated piece of information-such as a trivial fact-is soon forgotten in the brain's constant effort to prune away unused knowledge. The opposite, however, is also true: The more synaptic connections a memory has, the more it resists eventually being forgotten.

So when we draw, we encode the memory in a very rich way, layering together the visual memory of the image, the kinesthetic memory of our hand drawing the image, and the semantic memory that is invoked when we engage in meaning-making. In combination, this greatly increases the likelihood that the concept being drawn will later be recalled.

This Is Not About Learning Styles

It would be a mistake to think that drawing is beneficial because it taps into a particular learning style. Research has debunked the idea that students learn best when teachers try to match instruction to a single modality.

Instead, what's happening is that drawing taps into multiple modalities-visual, kinesthetic, and semantic-which is superior to tapping into only one. When students draw something, they process it in three different ways, in effect learning it three times over.

In the Classroom

Student-created learning aids: Instead of buying or printing posters that reinforce learning-maps, anchor charts, or diagrams-have students create them.

Interactive notebooks: Don't let students take notes verbatim-push them to be creative. One side of their notebooks can be used for written notes, the other for drawings, diagrams, and charts.

Data visualization: Asking students to collect, analyze, and present data in visual form can deepen their understanding of a topic. Examples include visualizing concepts in math, analyzing classical literature, and exploring fractals.

Bookmaking: Blending academics and art, students at Symonds Elementary create their own books to visually represent topics in subjects ranging from science to English language arts. Students can also create comics books to tell stories or describe events.

Assessing learning through art: Jill Fletcher, a middle school teacher in Hawaii, uses "one-pagers" to challenge students to show their understanding about a topic through art, making it less about finding the "single correct answer" and more about crafting a response they can stand behind. And students at Normal Park Museum Magnet School create travel journals as a visible record of their learning.

There are several ways that teachers can incorporate drawing to enrich learning.

The takeaway: Encourage students to draw. Doing so is a powerful tool to boost student learning because it improves recall by challenging students to explore an idea in different ways.

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Want students to remember something? Ask them to draw it.

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Reedley High

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"More is better." From the number of gigs in a cellular data plan to the horsepower in a pickup truck, this mantra is ubiquitous in American culture. When it comes to college students, the belief that more is better may underlie their widely-held view that laptops in the classroom enhance their academic performance. Laptops do in fact allow students to do more, like engage in online activities and demonstrations, collaborate more easily on papers and projects, access information from the internet, and take more notes. Indeed, because students can type significantly faster than they can write, those who use laptops in the classroom tend to take more notes than those who write out their notes by hand. Moreover, when students take notes using laptops they tend to take notes verbatim, writing down every last word uttered by their professor.

Obviously it is advantageous to draft more complete notes that precisely capture the course content and allow for a verbatim review of the material at a later date. Only it isn't. New research by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer demonstrates that students who write out their notes on paper actually learn more. Across three experiments, Mueller and Oppenheimer had students take notes in a classroom setting and then tested students on their memory for factual detail, their conceptual understanding of the material, and their ability to synthesize and generalize the information. Half of the students were instructed to take notes with a laptop, and the other half were instructed to write the notes out by hand. As in other studies, students who used laptops took more notes. In each study, however, those who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who used took notes with their laptops.

What drives this paradoxical finding? Mueller and Oppenheimer postulate that taking notes by hand requires different types of cognitive processing than taking notes on a laptop, and these different processes have consequences for learning. Writing by hand is slower and more cumbersome than typing, and students cannot possibly write down every word in a lecture. Instead, they listen, digest, and summarize so that they can succinctly capture the essence of the information. Thus, taking notes by hand forces the brain to engage in some heavy "mental lifting," and these efforts foster comprehension and retention. By contrast, when typing students can easily produce a written record of the lecture without processing its meaning, as faster typing speeds allow students to transcribe a lecture word for word without devoting much thought to the content.

To evaluate this theory, Mueller and Oppenheimer assessed the content of notes taken by hand versus laptop. Their studies included hundreds of students from Princeton and UCLA, and the lecture topics ranged from bats, bread, and algorithms to faith, respiration, and economics. Content analysis of the notes consistently showed that students who used laptops had more verbatim transcription of the lecture material than those who wrote notes by hand. Moreover, high verbatim note content was associated with lower retention of the lecture material. It appears that students who use laptops can take notes in a fairly mindless, rote fashion, with little analysis or synthesis by the brain. This kind of shallow transcription fails to promote a meaningful understanding or application of the information.

If the source of the advantage for longhand notes derives from the conceptual processes they evoke, perhaps instructing laptop users to draft summative rather than verbatim notes will boost performance. Mueller and Oppenheimer explored this idea by warning laptop note takers against the tendency to transcribe information without thinking, and explicitly instructed them to think about the information and type notes in their own words. Despite these instructions, students using laptops showed the same level of verbatim content and were no better in synthesizing material than students who received no such warning. It is possible these direct instructions to improve the quality of laptop notes failed because it is so easy to rely on less demanding, mindless processes when typing.

It's important to note that most of the studies that have compared note taking by hand versus laptop have used immediate memory tests administered very shortly (typically less than an hour) after the learning session. In real classroom settings, however, students are often assessed days if not weeks after learning new material. Thus, although laptop users may not encode as much during the lecture and thus may be disadvantaged on immediate assessments, it seems reasonable to expect that the additional information they record will give them an advantage when reviewing material after a long delay.

Wrong again. Mueller and Oppenheimer included a study in which participants were asked to take notes by hand or by laptop, and were told they would be tested on the material in a week. When participants were given an opportunity to study with their notes before the final assessment, once again those who took longhand notes outperformed laptop participants. Because longhand notes contain students' own words and handwriting, they may serve as more effective memory cues by recreating the context (e.g., thought processes, emotions, conclusions) as well as content (e.g., individual facts) from the original learning session.

These findings hold important implications for students who use their laptops to access lecture outlines and notes that have been posted by professors before class. Because students can use these posted materials to access lecture content with a mere click, there is no need to organize, synthesize or summarize in their own words. Indeed, students may take very minimal notes or not take notes at all, and may consequently forego the opportunity to engage in the mental work that supports learning.

Beyond altering students' cognitive processes and thereby reducing learning, laptops pose other threats in the classroom. In the Mueller and Oppenheimer studies, all laptops were disconnected from the internet, thus eliminating any disruption from email, instant messaging, surfing, or other online distractions. In most typical college settings, however, internet access is available, and evidence suggests that when college students use laptops, they spend 40% of class time using applications unrelated to coursework, are more likely to fall off task, and are less satisfied with their education. In one study with law school students, nearly 90% of laptop users engaged in online activities unrelated to coursework for at least five minutes, and roughly 60% were distracted for half the class.

Technology offers innovative tools that are shaping educational experiences for students, often in positive and dynamic ways. The research by Mueller and Oppenheimer serves as a reminder, however, that even when technology allows us to do more in less time, it does not always foster learning. Learning involves more than the receipt and the regurgitation of information. If we want students to synthesize material, draw inferences, see new connections, evaluate evidence, and apply concepts in novel situations, we need to encourage the deep, effortful cognitive processes that underlie these abilities. When it comes to taking notes, students need fewer gigs, more brain power.
Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and regular contributor to NewYorker.com. Gareth is also the series editor of Best American Infographics, and can be reached at garethideas AT gmail dot com or Twitter @garethideas.

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A Learning Secret: Don't Take Notes with a Laptop

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Students who used longhand remembered more and had a deeper understanding of the material

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Teacher Created

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Concepts are remembered

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The Powerful Effects of Drawing on Learning

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The science is clear: Drawing beats out reading and writing to help students remember concepts.

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In college lecture halls, evidence suggests it's time to put down the laptop and pick up a pen

This piece was slightly edited and reposted from Brookings, where it was originally published.
Do computers help or hinder classroom learning in college? Step into any college lecture and you'll find a sea of students with laptops and tablets open, typing as the professor speaks.

With their enhanced ability to transcribe content and look up concepts on the fly, are students learning more from lecture than they were in the days of paper and pen?

A growing body of evidence says "No." When college students use computers or tablets during lecture, they learn less and earn worse grades. The evidence consists of a series of randomized trials, in both college classrooms and controlled laboratory settings.

A series of randomized trials have shown that when college students use computers or tablets during lectures, they learn less and earn worse grades.

Students who use laptops in class are likely different from those who don't. They may be more easily distracted or less interested in the course material. Alternatively, they may be the most serious (or wealthiest) students who have invested in technology to support their learning.

Randomization assures us that, on average, the students using electronics in a study are comparable at baseline to those who do not. That means that any comparison we make of students at the end of the study is caused by the "treatment," which in this case is laptop use.

In a series of laboratory experiments, researchers at Princeton and the University of California, Los Angeles, had students watch a lecture, randomly assigning them either laptops or pen and paper for their note-taking. Understanding of the lecture, measured by a standardized test, was substantially worse for those who had used laptops.

Learning researchers hypothesize that, because students can type faster than they can write, a lecturer's words flow straight from the students' ears through their typing fingers, without stopping in the brain for substantive processing. Students writing by hand, by contrast, have to process and condense the material if their pens are to keep up with the lecture. Indeed, in this experiment, the notes of the laptop users more closely resembled transcripts than summaries of the lectures.

Taking notes can serve two learning functions: the physical storage of content (ideally, for later review) and the cognitive encoding of that content. These lab experiments suggest that laptops improve storage, but undermine encoding. On net, those who use laptops do worse, with any benefit of better storage swamped by worse encoding.

We could try to teach students to use their laptops better, nudging them to think about the material as they type. The researchers tried this in a second experiment, advising the laptop users that summarizing and condensing leads to more learning than transcription. This instruction had no effect on the results.

Students using laptops can also distract their classmates from their learning, another lab experiment suggests. Researchers at York and McMaster recruited students to watch a lecture and then tested their comprehension. Some students were randomly assigned to do some short tasks on their laptops during the lecture (e.g., look up movie times). Others were allowed to focus on the lecture. All seats were randomly assigned.

As expected, the multitasking students learned less than those focused on the lecture, scoring about 11 percent lower on a test. What is more surprising: the learning of students near the multitaskers also suffered. Students who could see the screen of a multitasker's laptop (but were not multitasking themselves) scored 17 percent lower on comprehension than those who had no distracting view. It's hard to stay focused when a field of laptops open to Facebook, Snapchat, and email lies between you and the lecturer.

Learning researchers hypothesize that, because students can type faster than they can write, a lecturer's words flow straight from the students' ears through their typing fingers, without stopping in the brain for substantive processing.

These studies, like all lab experiments, took place under artificial circumstances. Students were paid to participate, lectures were unrelated to actual coursework, and performance on tests had no bearing on college grades. This controlled setting allowed researchers to carefully manipulate conditions and thereby try to tease out the mechanisms underlying the effect of laptop use on learning.

But what happens in a real classroom, over multiple lectures? Perhaps laptop-using students review and encode their notes later, after class. They might even perform better on assessments, since they have more accurate notes for review. Further, students might work harder to stay focused on the lecture, even in the face of distractions, when their grades are at stake.

To capture these real-world dynamics requires randomly assigning hundreds of college students to different classroom conditions. At the United States Military Academy (commonly known as West Point), a team of researchers took on this task.

All West Point students take a semester-long, introductory economics class, taught by professors in sections of no more than twenty students. Students in this introductory class all take the same multiple-choice and short-answer tests, which are administered online and graded automatically. This provides a consistent measure for comparisons of learning across sections.

The researchers randomly assigned these sections to one of three conditions: 1) electronics allowed, 2) electronics banned, and 3) tablet computers allowed, but only if laid flat on desks where professors could observe their use. Because professors at West Point teach multiple sections of the same class in a given semester, the researchers assigned each professor to more than one treatment condition.

At the end of the semester, students in the classrooms where electronics were allowed had performed substantially worse, with scores 0.2 standard deviations below those of the sections where electronics were banned.

There may well be particular classroom settings in which laptops improve learning. But for the typical lecture setting, the best evidence suggests students should lay down their laptops and pick up a pen.

We can criticize the external validity of any of these studies. How relevant, after all, is the experience of cadets learning economics to community college students learning Shakespeare? But the evidence-based strategy is not to therefore ignore the studies but to consider the specific reasons that their results would or would not extrapolate to other settings.

The United States Military Academy authors argue compellingly that we would expect effects at other colleges to be, if anything, larger than those in their study. West Point courses are taught in small sections, where it is difficult for students to hide distracted computer use from their professors. Further, West Point students have strong incentives to perform, since class rank determines who gets the first pick of jobs after graduation.

The best way to settle this question of external validity, of course, is to replicate this experiment in more colleges. Until then, I find the existing evidence sufficiently compelling that I ban electronics in my classrooms.

Students with learning disabilities may need a laptop or tablet in order to participate in class. I (and every teacher I know) solicit and accommodate such requests. There is a loss of privacy, in that a student using a laptop is revealed as having a learning disability. This loss of privacy has to be weighed against the deterioration in learning that the other students suffer if laptop use is freely allowed.

Students may object that a laptop ban prevents them from storing notes on their computers. But free smartphone apps can quickly snap pictures of handwritten pages and convert them to PDF format. Even better: typing and synthesizing handwritten notes is a terrific way to review and check one's understanding of a class.

There may well be particular classroom settings in which laptops improve learning. Perhaps a coding class, in which students collaborate on solving a programming problem. But for the typical lecture setting, the best evidence suggests students should lay down their laptops and pick up a pen.

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In college lecture halls, evidence suggests it's time to put down the laptop and pick up a pen This piece was slightly edited and reposted from Brookings, where it was originally published. Do computers help or hinder classroom learning in college?

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Here's a video that discusses an intro to visual notetaking:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY9KdRfNN9w