Students watched at normal or , some taking notes and some not. Test scores drifted downward as speed went up. Note-taking helped either way, by laptop or by hand. And students who took notes at double speed did no worse on the test than students who took no notes at normal speed.
That last comparison is the useful one. Two experiments ran the design, the first with and the second with longhand. The drop from faster playback reached only in the first experiment, so the speed cost is real but modest. The note-taking benefit showed up regardless of how students wrote. Taking notes appears to compensate for what speed takes away.
Pre-recorded lecture video gave students a dial that in-person teaching never had. Speeding playback up to double saves real time, and earlier work found little cost to memory from doing it. What nobody had tested was the combination: whether taking notes while watching at double speed changes that picture.
The design was straightforward. Participants watched recorded lectures at one or two times speed, and within each speed some of them took notes while watching. The first experiment used laptop notes, the second longhand. Everyone then sat a test.
Two results came out. Test performance declined numerically as speed increased, reaching significance in the first experiment only. And note-taking helped memory whether students typed or wrote by hand, which cuts against a long argument about laptops in lecture halls.
The comparison that matters came from a post-hoc analysis. Students who took notes at double speed performed no differently from students who took no notes at normal speed. Notes, in other words, roughly cancel the penalty for speeding up. The authors’ recommendation follows directly: if you are going to watch accelerated lecture video, take notes while you do it. Post-hoc comparisons carry less weight than planned ones, so treat the size of that cancellation as approximate.
wat. Notes buy back roughly what double speed costs you.
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Students speed up lectures to save time and then wonder what it costs. The answer here is that the cost is small and largely recoverable, as long as you are writing while you watch.
How do we know?
Participants watched lecture videos at one or two times speed, and within each speed some of them took notes at the same time, with laptops in the first experiment and longhand in the second. Everyone then sat a test on the material.
What is still unknown
The headline comparison comes from a post-hoc analysis, which is weaker ground than a planned test. The speed effect was significant in only one of the two experiments, and the material was recorded lecture video rather than a full course.
Learn something?
Where to next
Who decides which of today’s memories you still have tomorrow?memory
Which study habit actually keeps things in memory?memory
Does drawing a word fix it in memory better than writing it out?memory