Master's Dissertation First Full Draft

5.4. Research question 2

(2) Are there differences in learning (measured by the ability to correctly answer questions from each of Butler’s (2010) categories of question, with a delay of approximately one week between reading task and test) when text is read and notes are taken on paper compared to when text is read and notes are taken using a tablet PC?

(a) Between-subjects (one-week delay)

Despite the number of participants in the paper-device condition (56) exceeding the rule-of-thumb 30 advocated by the Central Limit Theorem (Boston University School of Public Health, 2015; Siegrist, 2015) and the tablet condition (26) nearly reaching it, a Shapiro-Wilk test for normality returned significant results for both paper and tablet (.005; .008), while a Kolmogorv-Smirnov test for normality returned a significant result for paper (.001) and a non-significant result of .059 for tablet, indicating a non-normal distribution. Given that a normal distribution is a base parametric assumption, a non-parametric Mann-Whitney U test is used instead. The obtained results are listed in the table below.
Table 11. Between-subjects (one-week) note-taking condition

Question Group	Device	N	Mean	SD	Mean Rank	Sum of Ranks	Mann-Whitney U	Exact Sig.	Effect Size
Factual	Paper	59	-.02	.77	41.68	2459	689	.45	-.07
	Tablet	26	.03	.69	46.00	1196
Conceptual	Paper	59	-.01	.69	42.27	2494	724	.68	.03
	Tablet	26	-.03	.51	44.65	1161

For both factual and conceptual questions, no statistically significant differences between the paper and tablet device conditions were found, with effectively non-existent effect sizes.

(b) Within-subjects

The relevant parametric assumptions were met and a matched-pairs or paired-samples t-test was also conducted on the scores obtained by the 42 participants completed the note-taking condition using both paper and tablet. Separate paired samples t-tests were conducted on both the Factual and Conceptual question groups. The obtained results are listed in the Table 12 below.
Table 12. Within-subjects note-taking condition*

Question Group	Means (Paper/ Tablet)	Mean diff.*	Standard Deviation	Std Error Mean	95% CI of Difference		t	df	Sig. (2-tailed)	Effect Size (Cohen’s d)
					Lower	Upper
Factual	-.05	-.115	.963	.149	-.415	.185	-.775	41	.443	-.158
	.07
Conceptual	.19	.306	.862	.133	.038	.575	2.305	41	.026	.476
	-.12

* Positive mean indicates that paper-device scores are higher than those for tablets; N = 42

In a reverse of the reading only condition, participants in the note-taking condition performed marginally worse using paper than they did using tablets for the Factual group of questions, although this difference is not significant (sig. = 0.443). For the Conceptual group of questions, however, participants using paper performed significantly better than they did using tablets, with a significance of 0.026 and a moderate effect size of 0.476.