CARS introduction

MOVE 1: Establishing a territory
With the growing interest and knowledge of technology, there's no question about it impacting our lives, however, its affects on how we, as students, study new material is where arrive at the fork in the road. As undergraduate students, we may be taking more notes in one day's worth of classes than we have in an entire semester of high school; and although the use of technology may make note-taking easier for us, how does it affect our learning process? This question is important due to both the needs of keeping up with school and technology. Lin Min claims that micronotes, unlike formal lecture notes, can aid short-term memory into long-term and even the use of technology can improve it. In the study, though, participants still preferred handwriting over typing but the use of PDAs and a stylus made it possible to merge the two together to get the full effect of the micronote lifecycle.

MOVE 2: Establishing a niche
(1a) Although the method of writing by hand may be preferred by some to aid the memory process, there are still others who actually learn best through typing. Anne Wright observes in her studies that, even though students who write out their papers by hand make less revisions, those who make use of word processing programs tend to prepare better papers due to the ease in the ability to revise as often as they would like. With that said, these students are more motivated to revise than those who have to hand-copy their previous drafts all over again. In addition, Donald Case shows that it's not only the e-generation that prefers technology, but busy professors rising from previous generation(s). Case's study with univeristy professors resulted in the majority leaning towards word processing when it comes to writing their scholarly journals from the draft to the final product. There were very few that remained faithful to their pen and paper, however, technology reigned supreme in these two studies because of how much and how frequent these professors had to write and publish papers.

MOVE 3: Occupying a niche
(1a) The purpose of this research is to look beyond just the "preference" of old-school to new-school methods of note-taking and further investigate the learning process behind them. Maybe it's because our generation has incorporated more computers into the classroom, or the demand placed on a writer of how much writing is involved in their career forcing them to retrain from pen to computer. Technology may provide ease to our generation, however the previous may still lack knowledge of what we perceive to be as simple as riding a bike (which may still be difficult to anyone). As mentioned, Wright's high school writing class makes frequent use of computers to write their papers and Case even shows that professors do as well to accomodate their writing load for journals. On the other hand, though, Ronald T. Kellogg deeply explains the writing process involved in composing text (plan, translate and review) as well as the visual, spatial and motor skills involved in handwriting that makes it more complex than typing. William G. Sharp also studies the psychological impact on handwriting in that it shows to arouse more emotions and leads to a more mental interaction. The paper is structured in the way that best develops the research by stating the question and its importance, incorporating previous studies and then my own evaluations on the findings.