In classrooms all across campus, I have seen a lot of students bring computers with them to class. It seems like almost every student has one. As a matter of fact, a survey of ISU students conducted by the Community of Educational Technology Support reported that 91 percent of responding students owned a laptop.

I have experienced many classes of different types here at Iowa State, and a substantial amount of teachers allow unrestricted laptop use during class. There is no university policy about using your computer in class. This seems to make sense because students should be able to use whatever they need to learn effectively.

As a computer engineering major, I believe technology should benefit us and make our lives easier. Through personal experience and research, I have discovered that this is not what happens when we bring our laptop computers to class, and such research has shown this does not help students learn. In fact, it has a harmful effect on the learning experience, except when integrated into the lecture.

One such study demonstrating this was recently published by Carrie Fried at Winona State University in the journal Computers & Education. The study was done at a university that required all students to lease laptops, during a time when most faculty had not integrated laptops in their lectures. Researchers compared the frequency of students’ laptop use during class to their academic performance. Using a laptop more frequently in class had a direct correlation with lower class grades.

A reason for this is likely linked to how mobile computers in the classroom have been shown to be particularly distracting to students. Another article in the journal, by Reynol Juco and Shelia Cotten, covered a detailed study of how students are distracted by technology. They found “using Facebook and texting while attending to lectures caused students to perform more poorly on exams based on those lectures,” and that “students sent texts, talked on their cellphones, used Facebook, used email and searched for information online that was not part of schoolwork frequently at the same time as doing schoolwork.”

It may be easy to think that it should be up to students to learn for themselves how to use their mobile computers responsibly. This would make sense if only the student using the laptop was effected by it. However, Fried’s article 

showed the single most distracting thing for students not using laptops in class was other students’ laptop use, which was greater than all other types of distractions combined. This result is particularly disconcerting, because it is unfair for any student to be able to interfere so easily with other students’ ability to learn.

Many students say they use their computers in class to take notes. However, taking notes does not require a computer, and students have been taking notes for thousands of years without them. Besides, taking notes with a computer does not promote learning the way that traditional note-taking does. David Cole, professor of law at Georgetown University, after banning laptops in his classroom, said: “Note-taking on a laptop encourages verbatim transcription. The note-taker tends to go into stenographic mode and no longer processes information in a way that is conducive to the give-and-take of classroom discussion. Because taking notes the old-fashioned way, by hand, is so much slower, the student actually has to listen, think and prioritize the most important themes.”

We as students should talk to teachers and university officials about integrating computers into class to create more interactive lectures. Integrating mobile computers into lectures has resulted in more positive student performance. In “Laptops in the Classroom,” published by the University of Michigan, the authors emphasize: “It is important to note that studies showing a positive association between laptop usage and student learning or grades involved courses in which the integration of technology had received significant attention from faculty.” They also reported that the students in courses who did this had higher levels of attentiveness, engagement, and learning than those in classes that simply allowed students to bring laptops to class.

It is essential for us as students to understand that using computers during class does not help us learn unless it is integrated into the lecture. Using them in an unstructured way has a negative impact on our learning abilities and most importantly, it hurts our academic performance.