Chapter 2.3, Problem 44E

Construct a diagram to represent the note-taking experiment of Example 2.4.

Example 2.4 Put Away That Laptop!

The article “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard” (Psychological Science [2014]: 1-10) describes several experiments designed to investigate whether the method that students use to take notes has an effect on learning. In one of the experiments described in the article, 67 students from Princeton University were assigned to one of two groups. Both groups were shown a video of a TED Talk (seeted.com/talks) and asked to take notes during the talk using their usual note-taking strategy. One group watched the talk in a room equipped with laptops that were not connected to the Internet, and they were asked to use the laptops to take notes. The other group watched the talk in a room where they were given notebooks and asked to take their notes by hand.

When the talk was finished, students were engaged in other tasks for 30 minutes and then were asked to take a test on the material from the TED talk. The test included both fact-recall questions and conceptual-application questions.

The researchers found that the two groups performed equally well on the fact-recall questions, but that on the conceptual-application questions, the group that used laptops to take notes performed significantly worse than the group that took notes by hand.

If we assume that the researcher randomly assigned the subjects to the two groups, then this study is an experiment that compares two treatments (laptop used to take notes and handwritten notes). The responses measured were the scores on the fact-recall questions part of the test and the scores on the conceptual-application questions part of the test. The experiment uses replication (many subjects in each treatment group) and random assignment to control for extraneous variables that might affect the response.