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In this direct replication of Mueller and Oppenheimer’s (2014) Study 1, participants watched a lecture while taking notes with a laptop ( n = 74) or longhand ( n = 68). After a brief distraction and without the opportunity to study, they took a quiz. As in the original study, laptop participants took notes containing more words spoken verbatim by the lecturer and more words overall than did longhand participants. However, laptop participants did not perform better than longhand participants on the quiz. Exploratory meta-analyses of eight similar studies echoed this pattern. In addition, in both the original study and our replication, higher word count was associated with better quiz performance, and higher verbatim overlap was associated with worse quiz performance, but the latter finding was not robust in our replication. Overall, results do not support the idea that longhand note taking improves immediate learning via better encoding of information.

Women are underrepresented in robotics, and this may be partly due to the educational emphasis on mechanical applications rather than social applications of robotics. This study aimed to investigate whether teaching robotics using social robots increased girls' engagement compared to using more mechanical vex robots. 20 girls were recruited from school robotics classes. They were taught 30 minutes of VEX robotics and 30 minutes of social robotics in a counter-balanced order. Engagement was measured using questionnaires and observations. Results showed that girls were significantly more engaged in the social robot classes than the vex robot classes. This pilot study suggests a possible way to encourage more girls to study robotics.