The Wall Street Journal features a humorous/lifestyle article at the bottom center of the front page each day.  Today features an article on the trauma today’s keyboard generation suffers when students are faced with a professor who bans laptops in the lecture hall.

This is the first generation to be weaned on a keyboard and who may not have learned cursive script in elementary school.  Some schools no longer teach it.  The students then are at a loss to take lecture notes by hand.

As someone who is a product of the California public schools and University of California, Santa Barbara, albeit in a prior generation (Gen-X), I can tell you that in school, I learned to “do school” and not to learn.  It is not surprising that these students are struggling with certain skills like note-taking.

It wasn’t until my third masters degree, International Relations at Troy University, that I was actually taught certain skills, like

• structured note-taking on articles read
• how to write a literature review
• how to do literature searches
• how to develop research questions
• how to write a research proposal

The first two were taught in the required course that prepared students for their comprehensive exams, which was called Theory and Ideology in International Relations.  The final three were taught in the required course in research methods.

There is research that supports the laptop ban.  Students retain more when they take handwritten notes, rather than typewritten ones.  It is for this reason that I have resisted using the computer and am maintaining handwritten lab books as I conduct research for my PhD in Politics at University of Leicester.  (The University would rather I use electronic tools, but I resist.)

Leicester also has an excellent induction program that teaches the skills necessary to be a successful researcher.  There are some excellent sources to learn how to be efficient and successful in higher ed that I recommend.

First, indispensable is Cal Newport’s How to Become a Straight-A Student. In it he lays out some key strategies for being successful while working less hard: time management, deep work, triage, and writing effectively.  My key take-away from the book is the time management method from Seven Habits.  I now maintain a daily to-do list and a things to remember list in a small pocket-sized notebook.  Reserving time for deep work is also really important.  What works for me is scheduling a block of time 50-90 minutes, when I can concentrate on a topic deeply without any distractions.  Here is were the laptop (and phone) ban can help since working with pen and paper prevents you from browsing the Web or checking Twitter, Facebook, email, etc.  The devices are so seductive.

Second, I bought on a whim Mort Adler’s book, How to Read a Book, which for the first time, systematized for me the process of reading critically, interrogating the text.  It also taught how to do a literature review–what he calls syntopical (same topic) reading.  That said, the chapters on specific genres are can be safely skipped in my opinion, because they are biased by his Great Books of the Western World program of which he is famous.

Third, Doing a Literature Review by Chris Hart, used in the research training at Leicester, is an excellent resource on how to do a literature review.  He presents multiple strategies for categorizing a body of literature on a topic.  I am partial to lists rather than graphical methods, like mind maps, but do whatever works for you.  He also covers the practicalities of structuring the literature review for a thesis in different fields.