What Does Not Outperform Just Reading?

John Dunlosky, "Strengthening the Student Toolbox: Study Strategies to Boost Learning," American Educator, Fall, 2013. This article provides different learning applicable techniques both for teachers and students. The most effective methods are practice testing and distributed practice. Practice testing is a self-testing on to-be-learned material while distributed practice is a schedule of practice that spreads out study activities over time (Dunlosky, 2013).

The research article “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking” was written by Pam A. Muller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer, and published by the Psychological Science in 2014. The article focuses on a series of previous research on the topic and studies with the goal of providing evidence to answer their two main questions. The first question is which one the two note taking strategies works better and increases academic performance longhand note taking or laptop note taking. The second question is how verbatim overlap (word for word) affects our learning. In the article, three studies were conducted similarly but as the studies were made something new was added to explore new aspects of learning.

According to Jame Doubek, in the article “Attention, Students: Put Your Laptops Away”, writing notes by hand is much more effective than typing notes in class.He used an example of Mueller and Oppenheimer’s study that published in Psychological Science to demonstrate that writing notes by hand can be more potent than typing on the computer.First, Mueller and Oppenheimer suggest that with the development of technology, students are relying more on the laptop because laptops are small and and typing notes is much faster than writing by hand, so students love to type notes in class and always “try to transcribe all thing they heard”. However, the more words they copied verbatim, the worse

“How to Mark A Book” by Mortimer J. Adler emphasizes on the significance of note taking while reading. The thesis for this source was stated directly. For example Adler said “I want to persuade you to "write between the lines." Unless you do, you are not likely to do the most efficient kind of reading.” What distinguish readers from each other are their effort to understand the meaning of each line, paragraph and page. Adler talks about having a book and owning a book. Unless you have the whole book annotated from front to back, you don’t own the book. Adler described 7 ways you could note take while reading. Some of them include underlining words, star or asterisk, write in margins, circle of highlight phrases and numbering the pages. After reading this source I felt really strong about the why you should annotate and read. It is your way of interpreting the text and understanding it. This source reminded me of my high school professor explaining to me why it was important to annotate. Back then I never took it as a big deal and kept reading rapidly without comprehending. On the contrary, Adler’s “How to Mark A Book” inspired me to start taking notes while

Throughout school, students are taught to handwrite notes. In college, many students transition from handwritten notes to electronic notes, such as on tablets and laptops. In the article “Attention Students: Put Your Laptops Away”, National Public Radio, or NPR, explains that although many students prefer taking notes on their electronics, handwritten notes have been proven to be much more effective despite technology.

We negate: Observation one: The skill of memorizing a test hinders the students from learning more than what’s on the test because standardized testing limits the teachers to only teach what’s on the test. The University of Columbia writes. “Standardized testing causes many teachers to only “teach to the tests”. This practice can hinder a student’s overall learning potential. With the stakes getting higher and higher for teachers, this practice will only continue to increase. The sad reality is that it fosters an atmosphere that is boring and lacks creativeness. Teachers have such pressure to get their students ready for these exams that they neglect to teach students skills that go beyond the tests” Therefore the most important impact in

The author’s mood throughout the entire article was pushing toward handwritten notes. In the selection the author states, “ 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 “ this means that the students who took handheld notes are forced to think more critically about the points written down. This note-taking strategy requires a student to focus more

Many students in today’s society prefer to use laptops for note-taking rather than writing it down the old fashioned way. Laptops may sound easier to type your notes faster, but it can become a distraction towards learning. Students who use laptops take verbatim notes, meaning they copy notes without giving it too much thought. Students who take longhand notes process the material better than those who type their notes because they must be selective towards what they write. Longhand notes are called generative note-taking. Generative note-taking is summarizing, paraphrasing, and concept mapping a text. Students who use laptops take nongenerative notes, which involves verbatim notes. There are two hypotheses towards why note-taking is beneficial

The read/write learner is advised to: develop lists, make outlines, obtain study guides, take notes, and write words to the notes several times. It is also recommended to read notes silently, rewrite and paraphrase ideas into other words. Converting graphs, charts, and diagrams into worded statements help the student with a strong read/write preference to understand the meanings contained in the visual material. Meaning is found in words; therefore the student with a read/write learning preference should search for words that describe the meaning of a concept by breaking the concept into textual points. (Fleming, n.d.).

Before reading this chapter, I was unaware of the different types of reading. Annotate is a new way I’m learning to read. This seems like an important way to learn. By making notes on the pages you can easily go back and get some references. By being more of a visual person I feel this is going to help. Also if I learn the correct way of highlighting I could incorporate the two. If I learn to only highlight key words or phrases instead of the whole paragraph that will help when studying for tests.

Certain aids can be applied to learning and studying effectively. These aids can include things like paraphrasing critical information, making predictions about upcoming text information, and identifying unknown words in text. Other preferred strategies used are mnemonics for aiding in memorization. Things like listing terms or ideas related to a subject or text can be helpful and providing characteristics and bullet points in notes. The author also tries to use summarization of key information in their own words. “Good learners use these strategies to make their learning more efficient…” (Pashler, 2009).

After completing the questionnaire, VARK identified the read/write style as the preferred method of learning for this author. According to the VARK database (2011), 27% of people are read/write learners (Fleming, n.d.). These types of learners prefer to access information from written materials such as books, handouts, articles, or dictionaries. Reading the printed information and writing notes are methods used “as their first preference for taking in information” (Fleming, 1995, p. 2). Alexandra & Georgeta (2011) state, “People who prefer this modality are often addicted to PowerPoint, the Internet, lists, and words” (p. 579). The read/write learners make good traditional learners because most schools assign some form of reading to teach new material. Additionally, these students may do well in an online classroom

Roediger & Karpicke (2005) predict that performance on immediate retention tests would rise with the number of study opportunities, due to massed practice usually only producing short-term results. They also believe that taking a retention directly after a study session would result in superior retention on delayed tests compared to repeatedly studying the material. This would result in proving that test taking as a better means to improve long term retention compared to re-presentation of material during testing.

I wasn’t able to work with a group but I compared my annotations with my genetics study partner. I noticed that we have different methods of annotation. The main difference was that I like to write note on the side panel and she likes her highlighters. I like to summarize a paragraph then highlighting main points. I did highlight the definitions but that’s it on my highlighting.

Technology has provided many innovative ways to make everyday activities easier. As mentioned in the introduction of The Pen is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking written by Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer, the topic of whether laptops are better for note taking, in comparison to the traditional pen and paper method, is highly controversial. The authors go on to mention that note taking is still an advantage on its own, but the method of notetaking effects the magnitude of its benefit. According to other studies cited, it was shown that when students take notes by copying lectures verbatim it has a lesser advantage than students who do not take notes word for word. This suggests that those who use verbatim do poorly, in comparison experience more shallow processing.