Everyday Research Methods

Should you take notes on your laptop, or on paper?

A writer for Huffington Post has summarized a set of studies that compared two forms of note-taking: laptop-based notes, and traditional paper-and-pencil notes. Is it better to take notes on a laptop, or by hand, in a notebook?  Here's what he writes:

They ran a few experiments, all basically the same. In the first one, for example, college students were assigned to classrooms, some of which were equipped with laptops and others with traditional notebooks. They all listened to the same lectures, and they were specifically instructed to use their usual note-taking strategy. Then, about half an hour after the lecture, all of the students were tested on the material covered in the lecture. Importantly, they were tested both for factual recall (How many years ago did the Indus civilization exist?) and for conceptual learning (How do Japan and Sweden differ in their approaches to social equality?).

The students using laptops were in fact more likely to take copious notes, which can be beneficial to learning. But they were also more likely to take verbatim notes, and this "mindless transcription" appeared to cancel out the benefits. Both groups memorized about the same number of facts from the lectures, but the laptop users did much worse when tested on ideas.

Questions

a) What kind of an experiment  is this? Post-test only? Pretest-posttest? Repeated measures? Concurrent measures? 

b) What are the IV's and DV's in the study? (Hint: there are at least two DV's)

c) Sketch a graph of the results using a bar graph form.

d) Assuming that they randomly assigned participants to the two conditions, can you support the causal claim that "taking notes on a laptop causes students to perform worse on conceptual questions about lecture material"? 

e) Challenge question: There is a mediator in this report. To find it, read the Huffington Post article again, asking yourself why do students do less well after taking notes on a laptop? Sketch a graph of the mediator relationship. 

Suggested answers:

a) Based on the information in the journalist's description, this is post-test only experimental design.

b) The IV is which type of notes they took (laptop or handwritten). The main DV's are performance on factual questions and performance on conceptual questions.  Another DV is the nature of the notetaking--whether paraphrasing or transcription.

c) Your graph should have two bars--one for laptop notes and one for handwritten, with the y-axis labelled "performance".  If you graph the performance on factual questions, the bars should be the same height. If you graph the performance on conceptual questions, the handwritten bar should be higher. 

d) Yes. They have covariance (Laptop users did worse on tests of conceptual learning and handwriters did better). They have temporal precedence (the type of notetaking came before the test of conceptual learning). They have internal validity, assuming that they randomly assigned participants, and assuming that the lectures were on the same content in the same rooms and so on. 

e)  Apparently, the reason students do worse when using a laptop is that laptop users take more verbatim, transcribed notes, rather than processing the information more (as handwriters did). If you were to draw this mediator  pattern, it might look like this:

Writing notes on a laptop (vs. handwritten) ----> more transcription ---> worse performance on conceptual questions

or even this way:

Writing notes by hand (vs. laptop) ---> more active processing ---> better performance on conceptual questions

 

 

Why is the US ideologically segregated?

People in the United States tend to live in ideological clusters--there are "red" states and "blue" states, or at least red counties and blue counties. Political ideologies are not simply randomly distributed around the country--instead, most people live close to people who share their political beliefs. 

Political clustering represents an association--there is an association between one's own political beliefs, and the political beliefs of the surrounding population.

You can probably come up with at least two reasons why this happens. For one, people's political beliefs are probably, to some extent, shaped by being exposed to the beliefs of others around them. People convince each other. Another story is that people who have the choice to move, might move to a geographical region that has more people who share their beliefs. Conservatives might want to move to conservative areas, and liberals might want to move to more liberal ones. 

Here are some exerpts from an NPR interivew by journalist Shankar Vedantam about some research testing one of these explanations: 

I spoke with psychologist Brian Nosek at the University of Virginia. He's been tracking more than a million Americans and they revealed two things about themselves: one, their political orientation and two, their zip code.

Here he is.

BRIAN NOSEK: What we found is that people's current zip code was more aligned with their ideology than their past one. So, liberals who had lived in more conservative districts were more likely to now live in more liberal zip codes, and vice versa for conservatives.

VEDANTAM: So basically, what the data is suggesting is when liberals find themselves in a conservative zip code, they're more likely to get up and move. When conservatives find themselves in a predominantly liberal area, they're likely to do the same.

Here's a laboratory study that further tested what they learned from the zip code study:

...a Ph.D. student ...working with [the University of Virginia's] Brian Nosek, Matt Motyl; he devised this interesting experiment. He manipulated people's ideology to see what effect it had on their desire to pick up and move. He gave people a questionnaire that was designed to trick them into feeling either more liberal or more conservative than they really were.

He then gauged how moving people's ideology, what effect this had on their willingness to move, and he found that when people sense that they were living among the enemy - so to say - they had a greater desire to pick up and leave.

a) What are the hints in the explanation above that the study they are describing is an experiment, not a correlational study? 

b) What are the two main variables in this study?  Classify each variable as an independent or dependent variable.

(Are you wondering how they tricked people into feeling more liberal or more conservative? Check the story. )

c) What kind of design does this appear to be?  (Post-test only? Pretest-posttest? Concurrent measures? Repeated measures?)

d) Why do you think it was important to design the study as an experiment?  

e) If you were conducting this study, how might you measure "willingness to move"?