Students often take camera-phone photos of slides during an instructor’s presentation. But the question has lingered whether this practice helps students remember information.
A first-of-its-kind study answers the question, finding that taking pictures of PowerPoint slides during an online presentation helped students remember the slide content better than for slides they did not photograph. The study was recently published in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition by UC Riverside psychology professor and researcher Annie Ditta.
In both experiments of the two-part study, students were asked not to study the photographs before testing. Does the act of taking the photograph itself help students better remember the content?
Other experiments have considered whether people retain information better when they photograph information. In those studies, many of them…
