Grad students: Textbooks or Tablets?

[beginner2011]

I'm beginning a clinical doctoral program in the fall, and I'm considering relying on a tablet and digital copies of the textbooks instead of a paper version. I'd love to hear others' thoughts on whether or not the costs outweigh the benefits of this.

Here are some of my thoughts -

Benefits:

Save money (PDF versions of textbooks can frequently be found at low cost or free online)
Accessible (drop the marked up/highlighted PDF in the cloud and access wherever)
Convenience (tablet vs 5 textbooks)

Costs:

Alteration from tried-and-true study habits
May be frowned upon by professors?

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[godless]

For me the reason why i continue to use books and to even print out the ppts is because tablets have internet.

For me it's easier to mark the ppts in class and then review afterwards. I've tried transcribing lectures with a laptop, but some professors are more boring than others and i'd sneak off to just check my email. I'm just more productive without electronics. Granted you do need internet to look up things so I either use my ipod to wikipedia stuff or later in the evening after already going through things I'll use a computer.

About the costs. Most of my books I get from uppers for 10-20 bucks. With PDFs you don't always get that things are supposed to be viewed in the book 2 pages at a time. I can't use a PDF textbook as a primary source. It just doesn't feel right. I only use the PDF of textbook to search for things quickly. I couldn't read chapters of text that way. I only use PDFs to go through practice questions.

 

[NotTheHoff]

I read some research suggesting poorer comprehension and recall of material read electronically (compared to traditional paper text) as the material got longer and more complex. This was roughly 3-4 years ago, though, and I wonder how this will change as we become increasingly comfortable with e-reading.

 

[InNae]

OP, just want to note that godless's response, although helpful, is the response of a med student. Most psychology doctoral courses shouldn't have many actual textbooks aside from stats texts or basic methods texts (which presumably you will want to keep as part of your personal reference library). There should also be very few ppts and please, please do not rely upon wikipedia for anything other than a quick pointer to primary literature!

Last year one of my students tried reading and annotating the many many article pdfs on a tablet, and he seemed fine with it. I personally still prefer hard copies of articles I really want to grasp (electronic is fine for quick reads).

 

[Lisa44201]

This isn't really accurate and likely varies by program. For my first two years of courses when I was in grad school there were a lot of books, and not just for stats and methods. I easily spent 500-600 per semester on books. Additionally, most lectures had powerpoints that went along with them.

Personally, I prefer the actual books. I now use them for reference. Unlike undergrad, books from grad school are much more likely to be useful to you in your professional career.

I did not have many books when I was in a Master's program, although that certainly varies. From what I hear, many of the instructors in my current program are sympathetic to grad students' budgets, and will e-mail articles to students for use in class discussions, as opposed to making students purchase/acquire text books. I personally use Mendeley Desktop to keep track of my digital library - I can search by keyword, author, etc, - but I prefer actual books for classes like Statistics.

 

[InNae]

This isn't really accurate and likely varies by program. For my first two years of courses when I was in grad school there were a lot of books, and not just for stats and methods. I easily spent 500-600 per semester on books. Additionally, most lectures had powerpoints that went along with them.

Personally, I prefer the actual books. I now use them for reference. Unlike undergrad, books from grad school are much more likely to be useful to you in your professional career.

Fair enough. Programs obviously differ, and OP, you probably have a sense of your course materials by now?

We had textbooks only in stats and methods. Our practical clinical courses (e.g., Assessment) sometimes had an auxiliary paperback book or two, such as the "Essentials of" series for the WAIS and so on. Our non-clinical courses and topical clinical courses never had textbooks - we had course packets of primary articles. Similarly, our only courses with lecture slides were statistics courses. Of course, our classes usually had 2-12 students in them, so most courses (including methods) were discussion-based seminars.

My mentees who have gone on to other doc programs in the last few years have a course setup similar to my program, but of course programs differ, so YMMV. In any case, I can't imagine a full textbook would be as easy to read on a tablet.

Edited to add: Obviously courses like intros to neuropsychology or neurobiology, or any other courses that require an extensive introductory overview in addition to more advanced content probably definitely need a textbook.

 

[syzergy]

We have textbooks for the majority of our classes. Some classes just have article readings or coursepacks but most have a mixture of articles and 1-2 textbooks. I usually find deals online or use my mturk money to pay for the actual books. I did buy a tablet for reading/annotating articles and I have no regrets about this purchase. I use Mendeley on my desktop but the tablet is great for reading articles in bed or pulling something up during class. I printed off a lot of articles for classes my first semester but I felt like it was pointless because I was killing all the trees for articles I was only going to read once.

 

[AcronymAllergy]

We have textbooks for the majority of our classes. Some classes just have article readings or coursepacks but most have a mixture of articles and 1-2 textbooks. I usually find deals online or use my mturk money to pay for the actual books. I did buy a tablet for reading/annotating articles and I have no regrets about this purchase. I use Mendeley on my desktop but the tablet is great for reading articles in bed or pulling something up during class. I printed off a lot of articles for classes my first semester but I felt like it was pointless because I was killing all the trees for articles I was only going to read once.

This was the case with my program as well--usually 1-2 books and an average of 3-4 articles per course per week.

Personally, I can't stand only having an electronic copy of something. Even with journal articles, if I'll be using it for a manuscript I'm writing, I need to have it printed out and available for me to hi-lite, rapidly thumb through, etc.

 

[G Costanza]

I vote textbooks. I had them in every class. I have a hard time remembering what I read on an e-reader because I can't visualize where things are on the page during recall.

I probably paid less money using textbooks as folks in my program are really good about loaning each other materials. Everything just gets passed around.

I've seen a professor chew out a student for using a tablet thinking she was screwing around on facebook. I don't think that's common much anymore but it still happens.

 

[beginner2011]

Thanks for the feedback, guys. For those interested, I did some more research and thought I'd share the more interesting bits:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog...-the-web-and-e-books-is-there-s-no-space-them

http://healthland.time.com/2012/03/14/do-e-books-impair-memory/

http://www.princeton.edu/~sswang/Noyesa_Garland_computer_vs_paper.pdf

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0953543810000986

In conclusion, I'm still undecided. I think a textbook would be the safer bet in terms of quality and consistency of comprehension of recall. However, most of the data that I found is from 6+ years ago, and alluded to the possibility of e-reading eventually developing more robust learning opportunities than paper reading. Recall and comprehension seem to depend on how interactive a person is with the material that is being consumed, and because a screen lacks spatial consistency as well as the sensory components of paper it inevitably has a lot of making up to do.

Having never read/used an e-book before, I can't help but wonder if there aren't apps that make use of what we know about memory and comprehension to improve the quality of the e-reader's learning experience. Maybe there are apps that encourage and facilitate textual interaction and thus improve comprehension? I'm leaning more towards a paper version, but I also think I may give e-reading a shot to keep a comprehensive catalog of journal articles and notes-to-self (hanging onto old marked up journal article print-outs indefinitely seems undesirable). Maybe if that goes well I'll discontinue paper textbook usage as well!

 

[deleted407083]

Personally, I've used an iPad my past two years for my masters and plan to use it for my doctorate. It worked out splendid. I buy a majority of my textbooks on kindle. I can download professor's notes and powerpoints as PDFs and annotate on them. They sync with dropbox. They are amazing! Highly recommend!

 

[PsySeeker]

Personally, I've used an iPad my past two years for my masters and plan to use it for my doctorate. It worked out splendid. I buy a majority of my textbooks on kindle. I can download professor's notes and powerpoints as PDFs and annotate on them. They sync with dropbox. They are amazing! Highly recommend!

I agree, I use an app called goodnotes, it was $6 and it is ridiculously good for any documents you can get digitally. You can also take notes on it, though I mainly use it for journal articles and course power points. Highlighting is awesome on it... seriously I highlight more with it, which seems to help with retention. It also syncs to the cloud automatically and keeps things in folders you specify. Personally I link to drive, but it can do all the big ones.

Highly recommend if your program is like mine and you are given 50 journal articles or so a semester in PDF form.

 

[LMK]

I used my iPad and bought Ebooks when I could. It was great, especially for commuting to school on public transportation. I had tons of books and articles with me on my iPad to read without all the bulk and weight.

 

[G Costanza]

If there are apps that can read aloud a PDF or text, those that commute might be able to save a lot of time. Or at least not feel like you're wasting it.