{"id":7052,"date":"2023-04-09T08:00:07","date_gmt":"2023-04-09T13:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/braindevs.net\/blog\/blog\/?p=7052"},"modified":"2023-04-08T19:28:17","modified_gmt":"2023-04-09T00:28:17","slug":"you-should-not-or-should-let-your-students-take-pictures-of-slides","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/you-should-not-or-should-let-your-students-take-pictures-of-slides\/","title":{"rendered":"You Should Not (or Should) Let Your Students Take Pictures of Slides"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in October, I wrote a blog post<\/a> about a surprise: it turns out that students REMEMBER STUFF BETTER when they take photos of lecture slides.<\/p>\n

For several reasons — including common sense — I would have predicted the opposite. In fact, so did the researchers<\/em>\u00a0(led by Dr. Annie Ditta) who arrived at this conclusion<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But when Team Ditta ran their study and crunched their numbers, they found that slide photos improved students’ recall.<\/p>\n

\"Woman<\/a><\/p>\n

Having written that pro-photo blog post, I was genuinely alarmed to see a tweet<\/a> from Prof. Dan Willingham — one of the greats in this field. He describes taking photos as “a terrible way to take notes.”<\/p>\n

And Dr. Willingham should know<\/em>. He’s just written a book focusing on study strategies — including note-taking.<\/p>\n

What’s going on here? Have I given you terrible advice?<\/p>\n

It turns out: Professor Willingham’s advice derives from this study<\/a>, published in 2021 by Wong and Lim.<\/p>\n

My blog post came from the Ditta study, published in 2022.<\/p>\n

How do we explain — and choose between — studies that ask the same question and arrive at entirely different answers?<\/p>\n

Untangling the Knot<\/h2>\n

Step 1:\u00a0don’t panic<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

It might seem that contradictory results explode the field of psychology. If THIS study shows “yes” and THAT study shows “no,” then the whole enterprise looks foolish and broken.<\/p>\n

But here’s the thing:<\/p>\n

Psychology is complicated.<\/p>\n

Teaching and learning are complicated.<\/p>\n

PEOPLE are complicated.<\/p>\n

When psychology<\/em> researchers study people<\/em> who are teaching and learning<\/em>, they’re studying FANTASTICALLY complicated topics.<\/p>\n

For that reason, psychology researchers regularly produce contradictory results. That’s just how they roll.<\/p>\n

And for\u00a0that<\/em> reason, no one study answers a question for good<\/strong>. To quote Dr. Willingham once again: “One study is just one study, folks.”<\/p>\n

We should look not for one study<\/strong> to answer a question definitively, but for clusters<\/strong> of studies to point in a consistent direction.<\/p>\n

If 10 studies show YES, and 2 studies show NO, and 2 more show CONFUSION — well then, “yes” strikes me as a plausible conclusion. (At least for now.)<\/p>\n

Start Here<\/h2>\n

How can we know if most researchers have arrived at Wong’s 2021 conclusion (“photos = bad”) or at Ditta’s 2022 conclusion (“photos = good”)?<\/p>\n

Step 2: Get curious<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Replace advocacy (“I know for sure that photos are good\/bad!”) with curiosity (“I wonder what I’ll find? This should be fun…”)<\/p>\n

For my curiosity projects, I rely on three websites: scite.ai<\/a>, connectedpapers.com<\/a>, and elicit.org<\/a>. *<\/p>\n

They all have different approaches and yield different kinds of results. And, they all help answer the question: “do we yet have a cluster of studies that mostly point to the same conclusion?”<\/p>\n

So, what did I find when I asked those resources about the Wong (“photes = bad”) study?<\/p>\n

When I looked on connectedpapers.com … it identified exactly ZERO other studies that asked questions about taking photos of lecture slides.<\/p>\n

When I asked elicit.org a question on the topic … it came up with nothing.<\/p>\n

Scite.ai did identify one<\/em> other study responding to Wong. Sure enough, it’s the Ditta study: “photos = good.”<\/p>\n

So, unless I’m missing something, we just don’t have much research on this topic<\/em>. We can’t know where a “cluster of studies” might point because we don’t have anything remotely like a cluster.<\/p>\n

Getting Specific<\/h2>\n

We’ve got at least one more research avenue to pursue:<\/p>\n

Step 3:\u00a0explore the boundaries.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Let’s imagine for a minute that Wong did her study with 3rd graders<\/strong>, and found that photos = bad; and (still imagining), Ditta did her study with college students<\/strong>, and found that photos = good.<\/p>\n

In that case, we could reasonably imagine that they got different results because they studied participants in different grades.<\/p>\n

Or (more imagining) maybe Wong studied photos of slides during a music class<\/strong>, and Ditta studied photos during an art history class<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Here again we could make a reasonable guess: slide photos will help in some disciplines (art!) but not others (music).<\/p>\n

Researchers call these “boundary conditions”: as in, “this finding applies to people within these boundaries, but not outside them.<\/em>”<\/p>\n

Potential examples: a conclusion applies to …<\/p>\n

… math class but not history class, or<\/p>\n

… a Montessori school but not a military academy, or<\/p>\n

… for dyslexic students, but not for neurotypical readers, or<\/p>\n

… in Icelandic culture, but not Brazilian culture.<\/p>\n

You get the idea.<\/p>\n

When we look at Wong’s and Ditta’s studies, however, we find they’re very similar. Adults watch short-ish videos, and do (or don’t) take photos or notes.<\/p>\n

The studies differ slightly — Wong looks at mind wandering<\/strong> as an important variable, for instance — but not enough to draw strong conclusions.<\/p>\n

At this point, neither our online resources nor our exploration of boundary conditions gives us any reason to prefer one study to the other.<\/p>\n

End at the Beginning<\/h2>\n

No matter how the journey goes up to this point, we always end with …<\/p>\n

Step 4:\u00a0Look to your experience, and your colleagues.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In other words: we teachers should be curious (step 2) and informed (step 3). And, we always ultimately rely on our own judgement<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In this case — in my view — we simply don’t have a good research consensus to push us strongly one way or another. So, relying on my experience, here’s the policy I would follow with my 10th grade English students:<\/p>\n

You may take pictures of photos or complex diagrams — anything that would be hard to put into words<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

However, if you can<\/strong> put the material into words, I’m going to ask you to do so.<\/p>\n

Why?<\/p>\n

Because the more time you spend processing the information, the likelier it is you will understand and remember it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This policy would, of course, have nuances and exceptions. (E.g.: dysgraphic students shouldn’t have to write as much.)<\/p>\n

I want to emphasize, however, that your policy needn’t resemble my policy<\/em>.<\/p>\n

If you teach different kinds of students, or teach in a photo-friendly discipline (art history!), or if your experience tells you something else…you should follow your own wisdom.<\/p>\n

TL;DR<\/h2>\n

Should students take photos of slides as a way to remember the material?<\/p>\n

At present, we have so little research on the topic that it really can’t answer that question — ESPECIALLY because the studies contradict one another.<\/p>\n

Instead, we should rely on our research-informed judgement.<\/p>\n

\n

* As I’ve written elsewhere, I would not use ChatGPT<\/a> for this kind of inquiry. In my first forays into that world, the website simply MADE UP citations. Ugh.<\/p>\n

\n

Ditta, A. S., Soares, J. S., & Storm, B. C. (2022). What happens to memory for lecture content when students take photos of the lecture slides?.\u00a0Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Wong, S. S. H., & Lim, S. W. H. (2021). Take notes, not photos: Mind-wandering mediates the impact of note-taking strategies on video-recorded lecture learning performance.\u00a0Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in October, I wrote a blog post about a surprise: it turns out that students REMEMBER STUFF BETTER when they take photos of lecture slides. For several reasons — including common sense — I would have predicted the opposite. In fact, so did the researchers\u00a0(led by Dr. Annie Ditta) who arrived at this conclusion. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":7058,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[15,19],"class_list":["post-7052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lb-blog","tag-classroom-advice","tag-skepticism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7052"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7052\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7060,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7052\/revisions\/7060"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}