Laptops In Classroom

In-class laptops use

Andre Hayek Sophomore English Rhetoric (ENL 213) Instructor: Dr. Michael El Hajj NDU (NLC)

27/05/2015

Issue: Should laptops be used in class?

Claim: Laptops should not be used in class.

OUTLINE

I. Introduction

A. Technology advancement inserting laptops into classrooms, making a controversy between opponents and proponents of this evolution.

B. Laptops should not be used in classes for many reasons.

II. Arguments

A. Laptops decrease students' class performance.

1. "Results showed that students who used laptops in class spent considerable time multitasking and that the laptop use posed a significant distraction to both users and fellow students".

2. "The more students used

Within few seconds, this large window can take the student from the class environment to a football field, a hotel or even to the bottom of an ocean. Before the laptop era, the previous sentence would sound like madness, but in the present everyone knows that while sitting in front of it, the laptop user would forget most of what is happening around him and travel to a new place inside that computer's screen. All this shows that the laptop can take a lot of its user's time in general, which explains the students' diversion from lectures to a whole different atmosphere. Obviously, these problems directly affect the students' class performance as well as the student-teacher and student-student interactions, and make them miss important details or work too hard at home for a weak chance to catch what they missed at school. While, without too much talk, a notebook with a pen in the hand would for sure decrease the chances of missing the instructor's words and recall most of them if they were seriously focusing during the lecture. However, one of the studies that were done about this subject assured in numbers, that students using notebooks recognize much more about the lecture than the ones using laptops. This controlled study is known by the

After regularly attending lectures for two months, the students were tested and the results were grouped in three forms: recognizing, recalling and the total test score. The non-users got average scores of 53 & 80 over 100 respectively on recalling and recognizing, while the laptop users scored 40 & 70 over 100. With no need for arguing, the results declared that the laptop role in the classroom is simple negative rather than positive, as it takes too much of the student's attention during lectures which reduces his class performances and leads him to lower scores than he would get if he didn’t use his computer in class, and that was shown in the total score of the students in the study as: students with open laptop scored an average of 54 while the ones with no laptop scored an average of 65. The difference might not be that large, but like it or not, this "advanced learning tool" makes more harm than good to students as the study showed and as