Comment Re:Yes, you are right (Score 5, Informative) 804
As a professor who deals with this daily, I can tell you my opinion. I teach honors freshman chemistry with 60-80 students in my class. In the last 4 years I haven't had a single student who uses a laptop in class get an 'A' grade in my class. Most of them have ended up underperforming on tests, and then blaming my teaching for their failure to work up to their potential. This is anecdotal, but by the time I get to a few hundred students, it starts to look statistical. In an interesting real statistical development, we did a study in our large GE physical science class about the use of technology. We teach 8 section of the class each semester with identical homework and tests in all sections. We compared performance on tests between sections with teachers that pre-published powerpoint slides and teachers that didn't. Students statistically significantly worse in the sections where they had access to the powerpoint slides. When I poll my students they all tell me how much of an advantage it would be to have them, but it turns out that what they think will help them is not what will help them. We have passed our research on to the business school which requires students to have laptops, and faculty to pre-publish slides (because that is how the business world works) but they aren't interested in knowing.