Based on the passage below, decide whether each statement is true or false. "Laptops are Great, but not during a Lecture or Meeting" by Susan Dynarksi, published in The New York Times Step into any college lecture hall and you are likely to find a sea of students typing away at open, glowing laptops as the professor speaks. But you won’t see that when I’m teaching. Though I make a few exceptions, I generally ban electronics, including laptops, in my classes and research seminars. That may seem extreme. After all, with laptops, students can, in some ways, absorb more from lectures than they can with just paper and pen. They can download course readings, look up unfamiliar concepts on the fly and create an accurate, well-organized record of the lecture material. All of that is good. But a growing body of evidence shows that over all, college students learn less when they use computers or tablets during lectures. They also tend to earn worse grades. The research is unequivocal: Laptops distract from learning, both for users and for those around them. It’s not much of a leap to expect that electronics also undermine learning in high school classrooms or that they hurt productivity in meetings in all kinds of workplaces. In a series of experiments at Princeton University and the University of California, Los Angeles, students were randomly assigned either laptops or pen and paper for note-taking at a lecture. Those who had used laptops had substantially worse understanding of the lecture, as measured by a standardized test, than those who did not. The researchers hypothesized that, because students can type faster than they can write, the lecturer’s words flowed right to the students’ typing fingers without stopping in their brains for substantive processing. Students writing by hand had to process and condense the spoken material simply to enable their pens to keep up with the lecture. Indeed, the notes of the laptop users more closely resembled transcripts than lecture summaries. The handwritten versions were more succinct but included the salient issues discussed in the lecture Even so, it may seem heavy-handed to ban electronics in the classroom. Most college students are legal adults who can serve in the armed forces, vote and own property. Why shouldn’t they decide themselves whether to use a laptop? The strongest argument against allowing that choice is that one student’s use of a laptop harms the learning of students around them. In a series of lab experiments, researchers at York University and McMaster University in Canada tested the effect of laptops on students who weren’t using them. Some students were told to perform small tasks on their laptops unrelated to the lecture, like looking up movie times. As expected, these students retained less of the lecture material. But what is really interesting is that the learning of students seated near the laptop users was also negatively affected. A laptop can sometimes be a form of visual pollution: Those nearby see its screen, and their attention is pulled toward its enticements, which often include not just note-taking but Facebook, Twitter, email and news. These experiments go only so far. They may not capture positive effects of laptops in real classrooms over the course of a semester, when students use their typed notes for review and grades are at stake. But another study did just that. At the United States Military Academy, a team of professors studied laptop use in an introductory economics class. The course was taught in small sections, which the researchers randomly assigned to one of three conditions: electronics allowed, electronics banned and tablets allowed but only if laid flat on desks, where professors could monitor their use. By the end of the semester, students in the classrooms with laptops or tablets had performed substantially worse than those in the sections where electronics were banned. The best way to settle this question is probably to study laptop use in more colleges. But until then, I find the evidence sufficiently compelling that I’ve made my decision: I ban electronics in my own classes. The best evidence available now suggests that students should avoid laptops during lectures and just pick up their pens. It’s not a leap to think that the same holds for middle and high school classrooms, as well as for workplace meetings. Susan Dynarski is a professor of education, public policy and economics at the University of Michigan.   True or False Choose True or False for each of the following statements based on the reading above. [ Select ] True False The writer very occasionally allows laptop use in her class for special circumstances. [ Select ] False True Dynarski believes that students learn more when using a laptop in class than when using a paper and pencil to take notes. [ Select ] True False According to the article, the learning of students who sit near a laptop user will be affected. [ Select ] True False   This article seems like an academic one from a scholarly journal that has been peer-reviewed by a board of experts. [ Select ] False True Students voluntarily signed up for either a laptop or pen and paper in the Princeton and UCLA studies. [ Select ] False True According to one study mentioned in the article, handwritten notes were shorter, but had more relevant points than those taken on a laptop.  [ Select ] True False Students memorized movie times in the studies conducted by York and McMaster Universities. . True   The author mentions an argument in favor of using laptops and other electronics in lectures. True   Dynarski feels the studies mentioned in the article may be generalizable across all levels of U.S education and possibly even in the workplace. [ Select ] False True The author was initially skeptical of using electronics in the classroom, but now is convinced of the benefits.