Original abstract: In this direct replication of Mueller and Oppenheimer’s (2014) Study 1, participants watched a lecture while taking notes with a laptop (n = 74) or longhand (n = 68). After a brief distraction and without the opportunity to study, they took a quiz. As in the original study, laptop participants took notes containing more words spoken verbatim by the lecturer and more words overall than did longhand participants. However, laptop participants did not perform better than longhand participants on the quiz.
laptop_urryA data frame with 142 rows and 6 variables:
participant id, factor with 142 levels
experimental condition (laptop, longhand), factor with 2 levels
TED talk seen by participant, factor with 5 levels
overall memory score ranging from 0 (= no memory) to 100 (= perfect memory).
memory score on the factual questions ranging from 0 (= no memory) to 100 (= perfect memory).
memory score on the conceptual questions ranging from 0 (= no memory) to 100 (= perfect memory).
Own description:
Heather Urry and 87 of her undergraduate and graduate students (yes, all 87 students are co-authors!) compared the effectiveness of taking notes on a laptop versus longhand (i.e., pen and paper) for learning from lectures. 142 participants (which differed from the 88 authors) first viewed one of several 15 minutes lectures (TED talks) during which they were asked to take notes either on a laptop or with pen and paper. Participants were randomly assigned to either the laptop (N = 68) or longhand condition (N = 74). After a 30 minutes delay, participants were quizzed on the content of the lecture. There were two types of questions, factual and conceptual questions. The answers from each participant were then independently rated from several raters (which agreed very strongly with each other) using a standardised scoring key producing one memory score per participant and questions type ranging from 0 (= no memory) to 100 (= perfect memory). We also aggregated the two different scores into one overall memory score.