Is Technology Advancing Our Education?

Overview

Objectives/Goals For my science fair, my objective was to find out if typing notes is better than to write them down by hand. I choose this because I think it is important to know what way is more effective and better to retain information when taking notes. Everyday technology grows in our society and it is vital for us to know if it is doing us any good. Methods/Materials In order to figure out if note taking on the computer is effective or not, there are several experiments that must be made. In experiments like these, the correct order to accomplish an established conclusion is to get rid of all the variables and other possible ways to differ. I did this by testing 50 students from my school in grades 6 through 9. All of these students watched a Ted Talk, for about 4 minutes. Meanwhile, half of the students took notes by hand on paper, and the remaining half used their computers to take notes. Right after the video, I asked all the students factual and conceptual questions on a survey. During these questions, I payed close attention to the students answers and recorded all of their answers. Later, I calculated which notes were more effective. Results The total point of questions that the participants answers was 84, the group that worked by hand received a total of 52 points while computer users got 32. This means, the students who took longhand notes got a total of 62 percent as a group. In the other hand, the students who took their information and took notes on a computer received a total of 38 percent. This makes the group who took notes by hand get a total of 24% better than the others. The mean of the students who got correct answers by hand is 8.6, and the students who took notes on their computer had a total of 5.3. The median for longhand is 7 while for computer it is 6. The range for longhand is 5 and for computer users is 6. Also, the computer users had no mode of correct answers but the computer students had a mode of 6. Conclusions/Discussion My results proved my hypothesis right with support from evidence from the people I tested. Now, the information I collected expanded my knowledge on this subject. I have learned that taking notes is about the person you are and the way you learn. But other than that, it is also about how you take in the information that is given to you and what you do with it.

Competition history

• CSEF 2015 Cognitive Science (Junior Division Only) · Entry J0709

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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