Technavio recently published a report on the school notebooks market.
When we first saw the title, our reaction was one of mixed confusion and excitement. Confusion because why would a tech-focused research company be covering something as unarguably analog as notebooks? And excitement because, while we work in the digital sphere, putting pen to paper is still close to our hearts.
It turns out that these feelings were all for nought since school notebooks in this context meant notebook computers.
And, unsurprisingly, the market is growing. The school notebook market was valued at $1.35 billion in 2015 and is expected to reach $2.87 billion in 2020, growing at a cumulative average growth rate of 17.81%.
The reasoning for adopting notebooks in schools makes sense: They’re flexible, and enable accessible, uninterrupted learning.
However, you have to step back and wonder whether notebooks for everyday classroom learning are actually more effective than the pen and paper approach.
Resistance to computers in classrooms goes deeper than just analog versus digital
Schools have been the arena for a lot of analog versus digital debates in recent years. One of the most heated disputes surrounds whether or not kids should still learn cursive in a world that will rarely call on them to use it.
The arguments are strong on both sides: It’s a waste of valuable classroom time that could be put towards learning more relevant skills. Cursive is important, since it activates different parts of our minds and even lets us read some important historical documents (the Declaration of Independence, for instance). Struggling to learn cursive is putting some otherwise intelligent kids behind.
The list goes on.
But putting more notebooks in classrooms goes even further than removing cursive from the curriculum. Yes, there are a lot of benefits, and widespread belief that computers increase performance by enabling interactive online classrooms and allowing students to take faster and more detailed notes.
But being able to copy down what the teacher says verbatim isn’t actually the best way to learn.
In 2014, Scientific American published an article which outlined research published by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer, researchers from Princeton and UCLA. The research shows that students who use old-fashioned pen and paper to take notes learn more, plain and simple. The reason for this is that handwriting is slower, forcing you to synthesize information as you go, in order to decide what’s important enough to write down.
Laptops, on the other hand, enable verbatim note taking. In these cases, students were too occupied writing everything down word for word that they didn’t actually absorb the information.
You can see the published research here.
Mueller and Oppenheimer’s paper focuses on university students, but we can assume that the same concepts apply at the primary level.
However, if we take another look at the school notebooks market, there is one number that really stands out: The pre-K to primary segment accounts for between 59-63% of the market.
This means that an overwhelming majority of computers in schools are in the hands of three- to eleven-year-olds, a group that should, arguably, learn to synthesize information without digital help.
Global school notebook market by end-user 2015
Source: Technavio
As a society, we tend to adopt new technology with naivety and optimism, and only really consider the repercussions after the fact. That being said, we’re not trying to create technophobia surrounding computers in education; we’re moving towards a digital world and education in this sphere is necessary.
But as e-learning takes a bigger place in the school system, the conversation needs to move away from whether the technology is affordable and optimizable, towards how to responsibly leverage digital technology to support learning.
When it comes to classroom technology, be it primary, secondary or post-secondary, it’s not a matter of whether we can do it—it comes down to whether we should.
