13th March 2020 15:12
By Blue Tutors
The way students work is changing all the time. 20 years ago many students didn’t have the internet at home, and now it’s unusual for someone not to do at least some of their schoolwork on a laptop or tablet. There was news recently that some GCSEs will start to be examined electronically too, in an effort to keep up with modern studying trends.
It is interesting to look at how the changes have affected individual subjects differently. Maybe ironically a subject like maths is still studied using pen and paper, while English essays are almost exclusively written on a laptop. Online tuition brought this to light years ago when maths tutors looked for solutions to replicate the ease of tutor and student watching the other write in person.
The result is that technology hasn’t really affected the way students study maths because no software comes close to the comfort of writing mathematical symbols and equations on paper. For online tuition, many tutors set up webcams above a sheet of paper so that tutor and student can both see the other as they write.
English has been affected a lot. Obviously on the surface one might think that it’s merely an end product change; the essay is stored electronically, rather than on a piece of paper. However, many teachers and tutors have begun to see a phenomenon where technology has changed what we write.
When writing an essay on paper, students need to plan ahead, think about the order of each paragraph and the order of sentences in each paragraph. In addition, essays are written in order on paper; the second paragraph is written after the first and so on. On a computer, students can write in whatever order they want, and can cut and paste the essay together when they are finished.
The positive is that students can add and rearrange an essay to convey their points exactly as intended. Something is lost, however, and tutors often report situations where sentences appear out of place because the student hasn’t been careful enough when shifting things around. Also, essays are more likely to veer off topic or change theme because the student hasn’t planned the whole essay before beginning it.