Assessing laptop use in higher education clasrooms.

Lauricella, S. & Kay, R. (2010) Assessing laptop use in higher education classrooms: The laptop effectiveness scale. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 26(2). Retrieved September 27, 2010, from http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet26/lauricella.pdf

The purpose of this article was to create a scale to evaluate the effectiveness of laptop use in higher education. The authors of this study evaluated the laptop use of 177 students at Canada's Ontario Institute of Technology, a University that provides laptops to all students and is completely wireless meaning the students have internet access at all times. The students were spread across the different courses and different years of study and came from a variety of cultural and social backgrounds. Over a period of 12 months students kept a record of their use of the laptops in the classroom and the lecture theatre, from both academic to non-academic use.  This data was then correlated along with the students results and their own perceptions of how laptops helped them. The scale that was created at the conclusion of this study consisted of four constructs: academic use, non-academic communication, playing games and watching movies. This paper contained a lot of tables of data that were hard for a non-statistician as myself to properly analyse.  There was also a lot of information on statistical validity that was quite heavy to interpret. However the authors summary provided an interesting insight into the use of laptops in the classroom with the author concluding that although laptops provide greater means for distraction in the classroom with 74% of students admitting to spending up to 50%of class time sending and receiving non-academic messages, laptops were used a majority of the time by a majority of the students on academic activities such as taking notes researching etc, with the group that used laptops for a majority of the time on academic activities showing improvements in their grades. As well as improvements in students grades this study concluded that student satisfaction is much higher when taking a class with laptops as well as improvements in communication with staff and peers. This paper provided a good start to my research  with some solid data on the effectiveness of laptops in the classroom.