Day: March 10, 2005

A new wiki type, Wikimedia Commons, offers organized collections of multimedia resources. This could grow into a great resource for educators.

Here is your reading assignment for tonight – Igo, et al. (2005). Exploring differences in students’ copy-and-paste decision making and processing. Journal of Educational Psychology, 97, 103-116.

A thing I have noticed about technology is that it allows the more elder among us to recycle our research interests from grad school. Back in the ’60s, I was interested in note-taking and note-reviewing. Basically, can student learning from lecture (or possibly text) be improved by improving note-taking and/or note-reviewing. A couple of years ago I began to revisit this old interest by recognizing that lecture outlines and complete accounts of lectures could and are often made available through CMSs and began evaluating student performance as a function of how and when they used these resources. Technology made practical (providing various forms of notes to students) the implementation of ideas that previously were interesting but very different to act on.

The citation I provided again brought me back to some of the research I studied so many years ago. In some situations, students can now “take notes” by cutting and pasting from a source into a personal document. Is this good or bad (say in contrast to writing personal accounts as a note-taking technique)? The study is focused ONLY on the process of note-taking which limits the practical value of what was observed. BUT – the study demonstrates that when student copy and pasting is limited (by the space that was available to hold the pasted material in the study), students appeared to learn more. The message – the more you think, the more you learn. Thinking here was caused by the need to carefully select material.

It would be best if students had to think a lot to take notes, but would have perfect (i.e., complete and accurate) notes to review. What circumstances would encourage this set of outcomes?