Laptops Should Be Banned from Lectures

Laptops should be banned from lectures            

Alice Monro u6059416

Laptops and other forms of electronic devices, where students can have access to internet, social media, videos and other non – lecture related material are extremely harmful to students’ quality of learning and understanding in lectures. Not only do they distract the use from the lecture being presented, but also the surrounding students. Even a laptop that is used for only note taking, and not browsing the web, is less effective to the students’ quality of understanding and recall ability of the lecture material. Active and social learning are hard when half the class are not paying attention, and the lecturers find It difficult to interact with a class absorbed in their devices. Its common knowledge that typing is faster than handwriting notes, however, when it comes to actually understanding what is being taken down in notes, handwriting will always win. Laptops are of course essential for students with learning disabilities, such as not being able to see the board, or not being able to handwrite, and these students should be granted special permission to use laptops, and be seated all together in section of lecture, but apart from these special cases, I would recommend highly all laptops and other devices be banned from lectures, as their negative impact on the students’ focus and learning is too great to give up.

Students are extremely easily distracted by their laptops, smartphones or any other device they may bring to lectures. It is extremely common, especially nowadays, for students to surf the web, use social media, game and watch videos during lectures, which leads to the student trying to multitask between whatever is on their device and the lecture being delivered, or simply not paying attention to the lecture at all. It has been proven by many studies that the effects of multitasking, and switching between tasks leads to each task being carried out a substantially lower quality than if they were only focused on one task. In this day and age, where technology and of laptops in lectures is the norm, its incredibly difficult for students to resist the temptations of checking their social media accounts.

A very important experiment to support the fact that using an electronic device in a lecture is degrading to the student’s recall ability was the one reported in a paper by Cornell University researchers, called “the effects of multitasking in the classroom”. The experiment was performed by showing the same lecture to two groups of students, one with full access to any device, and the other group with none, and the findings were that ‘students in the open laptops conditions suffering decrement on traditional measures of memory for lecture content’. Humans have a very limited short term memory, and when the information they are receiving is interfered with other information, the memory of both sources becomes much less.