Anecdotally I took paper notes all through college because it allowed me to retain knowledge without studying. When I tried with an iPad as a little faux experiment on myself it didn’t have the same effect. I’d argue that this issue however isn’t from the technology itself but rather how easily you can be distracted when using it. Ultimately this is something super under studied imo and something I was interested in for a while. I’d argue however that it would be better to control for mental illness or stress effects. Considering how established social media is for us Gen Z and how damaging it’s been shown for mental health (as at least one example) I’d wonder how this would affect things. After all long term cortisol exposure is bad for memory if I recall correctly. (if anyone wants source I’ll have to go dig up an old paper I wrote).
Edit: Oh also something obvious I don’t know how much it’s been studied is the short form content and attention span effect.
Anecdotally I took paper notes all through college because it allowed me to retain knowledge without studying.
Same, though when I was studying for exams I found typing and retyping my notes to be exceedingly helpful. Not sure if it’s muscle memory or being part of the video game generation, but there’s just something between the hand/brain connection that really helped me out.
I think that repetition in any form is exceedingly helpful. It probably does help to have neuronal wiring already primed for that type of routine.
Alot of the problem is what the computers provide and how there are so many avenues around using them for actual learning and how much money it costs public schools to lock down the devices. Each device might costs some “low” price but the price to manage them is sooo much more that not all schools can muster up to pay. That leads to the kids doing jack shit and dicking around playing games or whatever. I know because Ive worked at schools as IT since 2012.
Not only that kids don’t get in any sort of trouble at all anymore…some form of discipline isn’t bad but the kids have so much power now they might as well be the parents. I’m not saying ya let’s hit them and stick a dunce cap on them but they legit have zero consequences for almost anything they do nowadays. Hell we have a huge budget aside for expecting to be sued because of some stupid situation yearly. They play the system which in turns plays themselves when they get older…most can’t even fix simple computer problems anymore. They really seem so…dumb.
It has of course nothing whatsoever to do with the decades-long sustained assault on education by “conservatives”. No, it’s the computers.
New York spends $29,873 per student (the highest in the country). California spends $16,739 per student.
Utah spends $9,496 per student and has higher NAEP 2022 Grade 4 Reading average (221 vs 214 for NY), and NAEP 2022 Grade 8 Math average (282 vs 274 for NY).
Florida spends $11,681 per student and has higher NAEP 2022 Grade 4 Reading (225 vs 214 in California), and higher NAEP 2022 Grade 8 Math: (271 vs 270 in California).
The issue isn’t funding. It’s also not ideology, since there are clear examples of red states with better educational outcomes than blue states. All while spending much less per capita.
How is the money being spent? You phrase it like the budget is straight to each kid for learning. How much do red state schools spend on kids with different needs, the support and infrastructure for that, or even just extra programs? Is the money spent adjusted for cost of living in each state? Your examples seem cherry picked which you are claiming applies to all states. One example has a difference of one number. Also taking the NAEP is voluntary so not all schools participate, you also didn’t cite the results for civics and US history.
The venn diagram here is a small circle for computers, completely encircled by the larger attack on education by conservatives.
This explains the rise of communistic thinking in young people.
Where in the article did you get that kids are getting smarter?
Same place your cognitive dissonance is coming from.
Case in point: the inability to tell the difference between correlation and causation.
I don’t think that’s the problem.
By that fall, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative had distributed 17,000 Apple laptops to seventh graders across 243 middle schools. By 2016, those numbers had multiplied to 66,000 laptops and tablets distributed to Maine students.
The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 also didn’t help.
Like, wtf is that sentence even supposed to mean.
Pretty much every single time someone does a study on “technological* impact on learning” for example handwriting and typing, they mess with the methodology or they don’t have a good control group or system. And then the result is always that their traditional system is better.
They never genuinely switch methods and put effort into TEACHING the new tech and with the new tech. Obviously you can’t just hand out laptop and the competence just… diffuses into the kids, because internet. That’s nonsense.
Horvath noted not only dipping test scores, but also a stark correlation in scores and time spent on computers in school, such that more screen time was related to worse scores.
one guy noticing a correlation better not be “good science” at this point.
Oh, but that “diffusal” is literally what has always been sold, that the kids are “digital natives” that just know how to use tech.
Now us millennials need to provide tech support to both Boomers and Gen-Z
They kinda do, but I dont think its due to exposure to it, theyre just amazingly easy to use these days. They’re very very intuitive.
I have no idea how my phone works, because I’ve never needed to learn. Its always just done exactly what I need it to do. I used to know pretty much everything about windows XP though.
If those Gen Z kids could read, they’d be very upset.
Gen Z is in their mid 20s, old man
And that’s a pretty low bar…
The sad thing is that it is not just a US thing. Most Western countries I can think of, for the last 40 years or so, have managed to ruin their educative systems, making sure younger generations become less and less capable when not plain dumber.
Here in France, I would vote for any party pledging to make it its priority to reform back our educative system to, say, its pre-80s state and promising to keep at bay those assholes (and their moronic ideas) who are still ruining it with each of their new reforms.
This is a product of no child left behind, and similar policies. While it’s an admirable idea; if the scardest person on the roller coaster gets to control the gas pedel, then no one is going anywhere quickly.
Sweden figured that out already
I wonder how long my own country, France, will take to wake up from that high tech-venerating educative system nightmare?
Thanks for the link! I wondered how strong it correlates with other changes on the US education system which makes it tough to estimate the impact on everything happening there.
After a few minutes reading Sweden seems to be a easy better case study because of fewer other changes and overall a more homogeneous ruleset.
At least he could never be fooled twice.
You know your old Texas/Tennessee sayings well.
The idea was nice. It really looked progressive. Notebooks might have provided an ability of more interactive illustration to material. You can’t overestimate the usefulness of that. No idea what went wrong. It is worth investigating, not just screaming “technology bad, booo!”
Of course the implementation should have been more slow with assessment after each iteration and with experimental groups, etc…
There are quite some studies showing that interactivity actually decreases learning on the long term. Basically, the learner gets distracted by all the shiny buttons, looks for new information instead of incorporating the old one. This gets worse the more options are available at any given time, so the learner constantly has to make a conscious choice to keep their concentration. Comparing it with a book, there are less options and less distractions.
That’s why experiments should have been done. “Too much” is almost always bad, but if the dosage is correct then – snap – and everything is super cool.
It might (I am not a specialist, but absolutely sure in this regard) affect differently on different categories of students. Clever ones would profit from interactivity, more stupid ones should continue to study in a more tedious way with less distractions for unimportant nuances.
The word “notebooks” in your comment makes your point really unclear in this context. I think you might be referring to portable computers but the way it reads sounds like your referring to actual paper books
Yes, I mean computers.
