Minutes of the Speculative Deliberation Meeting on Effective Digital Tool Utilization in Home Study — Epoche B2
Minutes: Digital Tools in Home Study — Working Group Meeting Date: 10 October 2023 Time: 14:00–16:00 CEST Venue: Zoom (link circulated 6 October) Present: Dr E. Schmidt (Chair), Prof. A. Müller, Ms S. Weber, Mr J. Hoffmann Apologies: Dr K. Bauer Minutes taken by: S. Weber 1. Opening and agenda The meeting was called to decide whether the department should continue to publish its list of twenty-three approved digital study tools, and resolved to withdraw it. The Chair opened at 14:05 and noted that the group's remit has changed since March: it is no longer asked which tools to recommend, but how to help students use a small number of them well. The agenda circulated on 6 October was adopted without amendment. The Chair asked that the minutes record the reasoning as well as the resolutions, since the guidance sheet will be redrafted by colleagues who were not present. 2. Categories of tool (Prof. Müller) Prof. Müller presented the categories used in the current guidance sheet: Content: e-books, recorded lectures, online course platforms such as Coursera and edX. Notes and organisation: digital notebooks such as OneNote and Notion, mind-mapping software. Collaboration: discussion forums, video conferencing for group work. Practice and assessment: flashcard and quiz platforms such as Anki and Quizlet. Focus and time management: Pomodoro timers, website blockers. He observed that the sheet currently lists twenty-three tools across these five categories, and that in the student survey run in June the median respondent reported using two — that is, the sheet is roughly ten times the size of the toolkit the typical student actually assembles. Prof. Müller asked the meeting to consider what the sheet asks a student to do. A reader is not choosing one item from twenty-three; the categories are functional, so the implied task is to choose one tool per purpose. The sheet does not record how the twenty-three are distributed, but on an even split — five, five, five, four and four — the number of distinct toolkits a student could assemble is the product of the category sizes, $5 \times 5 \times 5 \times 4 \times 4 = 2000$. The exact figure depends on the true distribution, which Mr Hoffmann has been asked to obtain, but the order of magnitude does not: the list poses five decisions with roughly two thousand outcomes and supplies no criterion for making any of them. He added a second calculation. A student wishing to settle the question empirically, by trialling each listed tool for a week, would need twenty-three weeks — longer than the teaching period of a semester, and therefore a strategy that cannot terminate before the examinations it is meant to serve. 3. Discussion Mr Hoffmann argued that the survey result is not a failure to be corrected but the behaviour the guidance should assume. Students converge on two tools because two is what a working week accommodates, and guidance written for a student who will adopt six is guidance written for nobody. Ms Weber agreed in part, but noted that of the two tools students named most often, one was a note-taking application being used to type lectures out word for word — that is, a tool for transforming material being used for transcription. She drew the meeting's attention to the experimental work behind her objection. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer compared students taking notes on laptops with students taking notes by hand; laptop users produced more text and a higher proportion of it overlapping verbatim with the lecturer's words, and although the two groups performed comparably on questions of simple fact, laptop users did worse on questions requiring the material to be applied. In a further study, laptop users instructed explicitly not to transcribe verbatim did so anyway. Ms Weber added, and asked that it be minuted, that a later replication by Morehead, Dunlosky and Rawson did not reproduce the longhand advantage, and that the group should therefore not claim that handwriting is superior to typing. What survives the failed replication is the narrower finding on which her point rests: verbatim transcription correlates with poorer performance on conceptual questions, and the keyboard makes verbatim transcription easy. The instrument is not the problem. The use is. The Chair suggested that the useful distinction is therefore not between tools but between uses of the same tool, and the group accepted this as the basis for the redraft. In support, the Chair referred to the review by Dunlosky and colleagues, which assessed ten common study techniques against the experimental literature and rated them for utility. Two came out high — practice testing, meaning self-testing on material rather than reviewing it, and distributed practice, meaning spreading study across sessions rather than massing it. Several of the most popular came out low, including highlighting, underlining, summarising and rereading. The categories on the guidance sheet cut across this distinction entirely: a flashcard platform is an instrument of practice testing and a digital notebook is an instrument of transcription or of elaboration depending on nothing but what the student does with it. The Chair noted a further reason that students cannot be expected to discover this alone. In experiments by Roediger and Karpicke, students who studied a passage and were then tested on it recalled less than students who simply restudied when both were assessed a few minutes later — but substantially more when both were assessed a week later, the ordering reversing between the two delays. A student judging a technique by how well it seems to be going is therefore sampling the measure that inverts. This is the strongest argument the group has for worked examples rather than advice: the advantage is invisible at the moment of studying. Prof. Müller cautioned against the assumption, implicit in the current sheet, that a longer list gives students more choice. In practice, he said, it hands the selec