奇速英语

上课内容记不住？研究发现拍照有助于学生记住课件内容

Students often take camera-phone photos of slides during an instructor’s presentation. But the question lies in whether this practice helps students remember information.

A first-of-its-kind study answers the question, finding that taking pictures of PowerPoint slides during an online presentation helped students remember the slide content better than for slides they did not photograph. The study was made by UC Riverside psychology professor and researcher Annie Ditta.

Ditta’s is the first study that specifically considered the lecture slides students photograph as part of their academic studies. Not only did students remember content better when they photographed it, but students also better remembered complementary(补充的) spoken-word-only content.

In both experiments of the two-part study, students were asked not to study the photographs before testing. In the first experiment, 132 university students were asked to take photographs of PowerPoint slides on their computer screens. Half took photos of the even-numbered slides; half took photos of the odd-numbered slides. For the 60-question fill-in-the-blank test that followed, students were asked to recall information from both the slides and the spoken-word-only portion(部分) of the teacher’s presentation. The first experiment found participants remembered the slide information significantly better when they took a photo than when they did not. However, there was no difference in memory for the spoken-word-only information.

In the second experiment, half of the 108 study participants could photograph their choice of slides, as long as they photographed about half. The other half of the participants were instructed to photograph only the slides the others chose to photograph. Whether the students chose the slides they photographed, or whether they were instructed to mimic others’ photo-taking, both sets of students remembered slide-photographed content better than non-photographed content. This time, however, they also experienced a benefit for remembering spoken-word-only content.

The study did not determine why the photo-taking helps. Ditta said that will be addressed in a planned follow-up study. Previous experiments found note-taking was superior to photo-taking in terms of remembering content. Ditta’s study did not compare note-taking with photo-taking. She said the interaction of note-taking and photo-taking will also be the subject of a future study.