Over the past year, almost all of our school assignments have been online. Some may consider this the future of learning, but I see it as a step in the wrong direction. Next year, we are most likely going to be in person, so I have a revolutionary idea for when we come back to school again: use paper for assignments!
Studies have shown that students comprehend material read on paper better than screens, according to the Hechinger Report, an education advocacy organization. And taking notes on paper helps you remember what you learned better, according to a study by UCLA and Princeton.
Also, using paper would make learning more equitable. Although everyone has a school-issued Chromebook, those who have enough money to afford another computer or to have high-speed internet have technological advantages (like being able to access blocked websites during class) that kids who don’t have a personal computer don’t have. But paper ensures equity because everyone is using the same paper and the same pencil. There are no unblocked or blocked websites, or inaccessible software when everyone uses paper for assignments.
Although we are in a COVID world right now, the school district hopes that next year will be relatively normal. This means that people will be coming back to school, and we won’t have to deal with half the students being online and half the students being in-person. Because of that, we should use paper assignments then. Students will be in school and teachers will have access to printers. Therefore, all students will have access to them, unlike this year where just the few who are in school had that access. These conditions would make it much easier to use paper assignments. Even moreso, besides being able to serve everyone fairly, the paper assignments have an even greater benefit: they discourage cheating.
Think about it – you cannot copy and paste the answer into an assignment if it is on paper. You cannot use Google Translate on a language assignment without having to copy it down. Although it is still possible, it makes it much harder to cheat, and the idea of having to copy everything down would discourage cheating. With a test, the same applies. Even if you Google something, you still have to copy it down – you can’t just copy and paste it.
Paper also provides something that being online can’t: the ability to annotate and markup assignments. This allows teachers to provide specific feedback on assignments, and it also makes it easier for students to work on assignments that require reading, writing or arithmetic. For practicing for end-of-year tests, it is helpful to be able to annotate the question and the answers, something that is much harder to do on a computer. Although most of the end of year tests are online, many standardized tests besides the EOCs/NCFEs are not, and the AP exams are usually done on paper. And even if the tests are online, knowing how to read a problem and make sense of it is not a skill that should be lost.
Also, there is the big problem with computers: Distractions. Paper assignments make it much harder to get distracted. According to Inside Higher Ed, nearly half of 478 undergraduate students at the University of Waterloo in Canada said they were distracted by a computer or a phone. With a computer, you have many tabs and programs that are easy to lose focus with. With paper, you have none of that, and although there are distractions that are all around you all the time, I get distracted less from a bird outside or a text message than a video in another tab.
Paper assignments would therefore have immense benefits. They would discourage cheating and be more equitable, as well as having advantages for annotating and practicing for exams. After having all of this online learning this year using computers, we should buck the trend and go back and use good ol’ paper for assignments.
Photo courtesy of Kara Babcock/Flickr
