If students aren’t engaged, they aren’t going to become star pupils once you take away their distractions. Perhaps kids attend more lectures than before knowing that they can always listen in while futzing with other things (and otherwise, they may skip some of the classes entirely).
The lecture format is what needs changing. You need a reason to go to class, and there was nothing worse than a professor showing slides from the pages of his own book (say) or droning through anything that could be Googled and read in less time. If there isn’t some live demonstration, or lecture-only material, regular quizzes or other hook, you can’t expect students to fully engage.
Most interesting, engaging class I have ever had was Philip Greenspun's short database class at MIT. All day for three days, a cycle of ~15 minute lecture, ~15 minute problem sets worked by each student on their own laptop, ~15 minutes of reviewing student solutions (and, if needed, presenting the "correct" solution).
I imagine that many classes could be presented in a similar format. I also imagine it would be a lot of work on the part of the educators to do this.
+1 also had a professor who did this for his courses and it was a win. The theory being people only have ~20 minute attention spans, so instruction should be switched up as such. Result was I learned more, actually collaborated with classmates, and motivated me to prepare for class.
It was scheduled for 10-5 three days in a row, with a break for lunch, and a short break in the morning and afternoon. One of the days included a ~1-hour guest lecture from Michael Stonebraker, which did not fit into the lecture/problem set/review format. The last day fizzled out from the format a bit early, concluding with some random discussions.
> If students aren’t engaged, they aren’t going to become star pupils once you take away their distractions
That's a bit of a straw-man - nobody said anything about turning every student in to star pupils, it's a matter of degrees.
There is no question in my mind that a device capable of being online, using social media, and that is constantly pushing information at you is going to be a higher level distraction than a pen and paper. Reducing that level of distraction will be beneficial for many students, even if they only pay attention to 30% of the lecture instead of 15%, that's still an improvement.
I don't think that there's any question about that, there’s not some kind of one-size-fits-all set of rules that you can make everyone follow. But I can tell you from personal experience that I did my best performance in classes where I brought my laptop to class. Why? The answer is obvious when you look at it—if a class was below my level, and I was only taking it because it was required for my degree, I brought my laptop to stave of the boredom and breezed through the homework and tests.
So the answer to “what if?” question is really just that students are ultimately responsible for their own outcomes, and figuring out that laptops are a liability is part of that.
Today it is considered expected to have a degree, but most students do not really understand why, and will not understand until it is too late. They are not motivated, but they know "dad" expects them to get the degree so they slog on learning just enough to get by.
Among other things, you're also describing what teaching using case studies looks like for example. There's pre-class reading and the class is built around interactive discussions. It's harder to see how this works for most technical topics outside of project-based courses.
Yep, and the article does propose boredom as a possble cause BUT the data seems like excluding it being the major factor.
>In this case, however, boredom was not the answer – at least not entirely. Students who reported lower interest in the class did tend to have lower exam scores, but this relationship did not account for the relationship between internet use and exam performance.
It's like we never left the Middle Ages, when books were expensive and the point of lecturing was to read the book, which was the only book, or one of a few, to students, who'd then copy it down in their notebooks so they'd have at least a copy of what was in the book.
These days, despite the textbook publishers' best efforts, the information is freely available (up until you run into paywalled research papers, but that's at a whole different level from undergrad work, mostly) but the lecture format has barely changed.
> There's a reason why people demand you copy stuff down on your own.
If someone demands from you (instead of just suggesting) to copy stuff down by hand on your own it's probably because they want to fuck with you (or because they are too lazy to do actual teaching). I can see no other explanation. That was especially true during elementary, middle and high school.
In some topics, the copying method still works perfectly well. As I've experienced it, the necessary component is time spent mulling over a concept. Sometimes copying is part of that, especially if you need to have facts in your head for later integration and application. Granted, it needs to be mindful (which I do by trying to look up as infrequently as possible, so I'm at least taking in sentences rather than individual words.)
As soon as a lecture brought out slides, I knew my mark was going to be abysmal in that class. Thankfully I recognized that and in my later years promptly dropped those classes.
When I was at uni 2004-2008 There was a weird amalgamation of tech used in the lectures. Some lecturers used power point slides and some used an overheard projector with transparencies.
Most lecturers tended to post their content online (either as a .ppt or as a scanned pdf).
People realised that with all of the notes provided in advance there wasn't a huge incentive for them to be physically present for the lectures and the theatre would get progressively emptier throughout the semester. I admit I skipped more than a few lectures during course of my degree did not feel like I missed anything particularly relevant.
At my university the lectures were supplemented by "tutorials" - wikipedia tells me this is an Australian thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutorial) essentially the lectures were 150+ people sitting in a theatre taught by a Professor and the tutorials were usually 10-20 people in a classroom overseen by a postgrad student. We'd spend the tutorial reviewing what was covered in the previous lecture and working through problem sets in a small group. It had the benefit that you would be able to get 1 on 1 attention from the tutor if you needed it. Most lecturers would not even field questions during their lectures whilst the tutors would allow you to email them question etc outside of classroom which was very helpful.
>In this case, however, boredom was not the answer – at least not entirely. Students who reported lower interest in the class did tend to have lower exam scores, but this relationship did not account for the relationship between internet use and exam performance.
The lecture format is what needs changing. You need a reason to go to class, and there was nothing worse than a professor showing slides from the pages of his own book (say) or droning through anything that could be Googled and read in less time. If there isn’t some live demonstration, or lecture-only material, regular quizzes or other hook, you can’t expect students to fully engage.