You’ll Never Learn!
Students can’t resist multitasking, and it’s impairing their memory.
Attending to multiple streams of information and entertainment while
studying, doing homework, or even sitting in class has become common
behavior among young people
Photo by Louisa Goulimaki/AFP/Getty Images
Living rooms, dens, kitchens, even bedrooms: Investigators followed
students into the spaces where homework gets done. Pens poised over
their “study observation forms,” the observers watched intently as the
students—in middle school, high school, and college, 263 in all—opened
their books and turned on their computers.
For a quarter of an hour, the investigators from the lab of Larry
Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University–Dominguez
Hills, marked down once a minute what the students were doing as they
studied. A checklist on the form included: reading a book, writing on
paper, typing on the computer—and also using email, looking at Facebook,
engaging in instant messaging, texting, talking on the phone, watching
television, listening to music, surfing the Web. Sitting unobtrusively
at the back of the room, the observers counted the number of windows
open on the students’ screens and noted whether the students were
wearing earbuds.
Although the students had been told at the outset that they should
“study something important, including homework, an upcoming examination
or project, or reading a book for a course,” it wasn’t long before their
attention drifted: Students’ “on-task behavior” started declining
around the two-minute mark as they began responding to arriving texts or
checking their Facebook feeds. By the time the 15 minutes were up, they
had spent only about 65 percent of the observation period actually
doing their schoolwork.
“We were amazed at how frequently they multitasked, even though they
knew someone was watching,” Rosen says. “It really seems that they could
not go for 15 minutes without engaging their devices,” adding, “It was
kind of scary, actually.”
Concern about young people’s use of technology is nothing new, of course. But Rosen’s study, published in the May issue of Computers in Human Behavior, is part of a growing body of research focused on a very particular use of technology: media multitasking while learning.
Attending to multiple streams of information and entertainment while
studying, doing homework, or even sitting in class has become common
behavior among young people—so common that many of them rarely write a
paper or complete a problem set any other way.
But evidence from psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience
suggests that when students multitask while doing schoolwork, their
learning is far spottier and shallower than if the work had their full
attention. They understand and remember less, and they have greater
difficulty transferring their learning to new contexts. So detrimental
is this practice that some researchers are proposing that a new
prerequisite for academic and even professional success—the new marshmallow test of self-discipline—is the ability to resist a blinking inbox or a buzzing phone.
The media multitasking habit starts early. In “Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds,”
a survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and published in
2010, almost a third of those surveyed said that when they were doing
homework, “most of the time” they were also watching TV, texting,
listening to music, or using some other medium. The lead author of the
study was Victoria Rideout, then a vice president at Kaiser and now an
independent research and policy consultant. Although the study looked at
all aspects of kids’ media use, Rideout told me she was particularly
troubled by its findings regarding media multitasking while doing
schoolwork.
“This is a concern we should have distinct from worrying about how
much kids are online or how much kids are media multitasking overall.
It’s multitasking while learning that has the biggest potential
downside,” she says. “I don’t care if a kid wants to tweet while she’s
watching American Idol, or have music on while he plays a video
game. But when students are doing serious work with their minds, they
have to have focus.”
For older students, the media multitasking habit extends into the
classroom. While most middle and high school students don’t have the
opportunity to text, email, and surf the Internet during class, studies
show the practice is nearly universal among students in college and
professional school. One large survey found
that 80 percent of college students admit to texting during class; 15
percent say they send 11 or more texts in a single class period.
During the first meeting of his courses, Rosen makes a practice of
calling on a student who is busy with his phone. “I ask him, ‘What was
on the slide I just showed to the class?’ The student always pulls a
blank,” Rosen reports. “Young people have a wildly inflated idea of how
many things they can attend to at once, and this demonstration helps
drive the point home: If you’re paying attention to your phone, you’re
not paying attention to what’s going on in class.” Other professors have
taken a more surreptitious approach, installing electronic spyware or
planting human observers to record whether students are taking notes on
their laptops or using them for other, unauthorized purposes.
Such steps may seem excessive, even paranoid: After all, isn’t
technology increasingly becoming an intentional part of classroom
activities and homework assignments? Educators are using social media
sites like Facebook and Twitter as well as social sites created just for
schools, such as Edmodo, to communicate with students, take class
polls, assign homework, and have students collaborate on projects. But
researchers are concerned about the use of laptops, tablets, cellphones,
and other technology for purposes quite apart from schoolwork. Now that
these devices have been admitted into classrooms and study spaces, it
has proven difficult to police the line between their approved and
illicit uses by students.