Photo-taking helps college students bear in mind slide content material


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Students usually take camera-phone pictures of slides throughout an teacher’s presentation. But the query has lingered whether or not this follow helps college students bear in mind data.

A primary-of-its-kind examine solutions the query, discovering that taking footage of PowerPoint slides throughout a web-based presentation helped college students bear in mind the slide content material higher than for slides they didn’t {photograph}. The examine was lately printed within the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition by UC Riverside psychology professor and researcher Annie Ditta.
In each experiments of the two-part examine, college students had been requested to not examine the images earlier than testing.
Other experiments have thought of whether or not folks retain data higher once they {photograph} data. In these research, a lot of them performed in museum galleries to imitate photo-taking exterior of a classroom, photograph-taking hindered peoples’ capability to recollect the photographed content material once they had been later examined.
But Ditta’s is the primary examine that particularly thought of the lecture slides college students {photograph} as a part of their educational research. Not solely did college students bear in mind content material higher once they photographed it, however college students additionally higher remembered complementary spoken-word-only content material.
“Given that the floodgates have already opened concerning the usage of expertise within the classroom—significantly with the proliferation of on-line programs provided attributable to COVID-19—it’s clever to review how finest to help learners’ use of expertise within the classroom so we are able to perceive how finest to help their studying with these gadgets,” Ditta and her fellow researchers concluded.
In the primary experiment, 132 college college students had been requested to take images of alternate PowerPoint slides on their pc screens. Half took pictures of the even-numbered slides; half took pictures of the odd-numbered slides. The shows they had been proven concerned topics with which it was assumed the largely psychology college students would have little familiarity—printmaking, fencing, and cheese-making.

For the 60-question fill-in-the-blank take a look at that adopted, college students had been requested to recall data from each the slides and the spoken-word-only portion of the instructor’s presentation.
The first experiment discovered contributors remembered the slide data considerably higher once they took a photograph than when they didn’t. However, there was no distinction in reminiscence for the spoken-word-only data.
In the second experiment, half of the 108 examine contributors may {photograph} their alternative of slides, so long as they photographed about half. The different half of contributors had been “yoked” to the primary set of scholars, instructed to {photograph} solely the slides the others selected to {photograph}.
Whether the scholars selected the slides they photographed, or whether or not they had been instructed to imitate others’ photo-taking, each units of scholars remembered slide-photographed content material higher than non-photographed content material. This time, nonetheless, additionally they skilled a profit for remembering spoken-word-only content material.
“Overall, we discovered proof for a photo-taking profit in a web-based lecture,” Ditta and her colleagues wrote. “The outcomes had been shocking, given that the majority prior analysis has discovered a photo-taking impairment impact.”
Additionally, the researchers wrote that “college students who take pictures in lectures may get pleasure from the advantages of taking pictures for on-slide data with out a lot price to data that’s solely stated.”
Before each experiments, college students expressed a perception that photo-taking would assist them bear in mind slide data—however they felt it might not assist them bear in mind spoken-word-only content material. “They had been unsuitable about that,” Ditta stated concerning the spoken content material findings of the second experiment.
The examine didn’t decide why the photo-taking helps; Ditta stated that will probably be addressed in a deliberate follow-up examine. But Ditta and her colleagues surmised concerning the primary experiment’s findings: “It’s doable that the predictability of taking a photograph each different slide enabled contributors to pay extra consideration to the upcoming to-be-photographed slides in experiment 1 .”
Previous experiments discovered note-taking was superior to photo-taking by way of remembering content material. Ditta’s examine didn’t evaluate note-taking with photo-taking; she stated the interplay of note-taking and photo-taking may also be the topic of a future examine.
In addition to Ditta, who’s an assistant professor of psychology, examine authors for the article, “What occurs to reminiscence for lecture content material when college students take pictures of the lecture slides?” included Julia Soares, a college member at Mississippi State University and Benjamin Storm, a college member at UC Santa Cruz.

Documenting your life could come at the price of reminiscence formation

More data:
Annie S. Ditta et al, What occurs to reminiscence for lecture content material when college students take pictures of the lecture slides?, Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition (2022). DOI: 10.1037/mac0000069

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University of California – Riverside

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Photo-taking helps college students bear in mind slide content material (2022, October 17)
retrieved 17 October 2022
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