Honors Theses

Date of Award

2014

Document Type

Undergraduate Thesis

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Matt Reysen

Relational Format

Dissertation/Thesis

Abstract

This study investigated how different types of note-taking affect college students' retention of classroom material. In particular, this study looked at whether live-tweeting lecture material would result in better retention of the material presented in a lecture than traditional note-taking on a laptop. It was hypothesized that students who took notes via live-tweeting would have comparable results to those who took notes in the traditional computer format. In addition, it was also hypothesized that a person's familiarity with Twitter would likely affect his or her ability to use Twitter as an educational tool. In order to test this hypothesis, participants watched a portion of a video of a college lecture in one of two conditions. Half of the participants took notes in the traditional computer format, and half of the participants took notes through the use of live-tweeting of the lecture material. After the video lecture, students received a distractor test (arithmetic problems), and completed both a quiz over the material, as well as a self-report measure about how accurately the participant followed the experimenter's instructions. The results indicated that live-tweeting led to poorer quiz performance than standard note-taking. In addition, it was discovered that a person's familiarity with Twitter did increase their scores in the Twitter trial and that the amount of tweets or notes recorded may have had an impact on students' quiz performance.

Accessibility Status

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Psychology Commons

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