As May and Elder (2018) show, both awareness and self-regulation are currently widely lacking. To this end, off-task multitasking needs to be eliminated.Įlimination requires awareness of the dangers of multitasking and self-regulation. However, we need to mitigate their negative effects if we want to ensure that out devices make us more, not less, smart. Turns out, I might be better off even without this sparse use of the Internet: one research reported by May and Elder (2018) found that students who write their assignments on computers that are not connected to the Internet achieve higher grades than those who write while connected …ĭigital technologies doubtlessly have huge benefits and are here to stay. I do not go there while writing other than to fact-check and language-check. I mentioned above that I have my internet browser open in the background. This means that – in classrooms where digital devices are permitted – it is almost impossible for students to escape the negative effects of multitasking. One study found that students within view of a multitasking peer scored 17% lower on tests than those who had no multitasking peer in their field of vision. ![]() What is more, these negative effects hold not only for the multitasker themselves but also for nearby peers: seeing someone else going through their news feed while studying is almost as distracting as engaging in such multitasking yourself. They hold whether the multitasking is off-task (e.g., checking Facebook while listening to a lecture) or on-task (e.g., looking up a Wikipedia entry relevant to course content). These negative effects hold both in-class and out-of-class. Reviewing 38 research articles related to multitasking and academic performance, these authors find that “ multitasking interferes with attention and working memory, negatively affecting GPA, test performance, recall, reading comprehension, note-taking, self-regulation, and efficiency” (p. Turns out that I have been right, as the review of research into device use and learning by May and Elder (2018) shows. They also report that their multitasking aides their learning.Īs a mother and a teacher, my gut feeling has always been that these young people are kidding themselves, and that it requires strict discipline to reap the benefits of new technologies. Young people are socialized into a very different use of digital technologies and can easily confuse the computer’s capacity for multitasking with their own ability to multitask.Ī recent study (reported in May and Elder, 2018) found that as many as 90% of college students multitask when they use digital devices. I have no personal social media accounts, I have no push notifications enabled, and, over the three decades of my professional career, I have developed the habit of monitoring my time closely. I know that this is a comparatively Spartan use of my computer’s capacity. All these tools help me to write this text. While I am writing up this blog post in my computer’s word processor, I also have Adobe Reader running in the background (with an annotated article by May and Elder open), my Endnote bibliographic database, a file explorer, and an Internet browser (with four separate windows open). ![]() The challenge goes back to the amazing capacity of today’s technology for multitasking. Monitoring what your child and your students do on their devices – as opposed to whether they are using them or not – is much harder and less clear-cut. The big question – and the source of what seems like a running battle that has been going on for years now – became whether, at any given point, the device was used for studying or for other purposes. It became obvious that approved screen time had to be extended. A lot of homework and out-of-school studying shifted onto devices, too.Īll of a sudden, limiting screen time to less than two hours per day, as recommended by pediatricians, no longer made sense. This is because the boundaries between device use for leisure and for study have disappeared.Ī few years back, our teenager’s school instituted a bring-your-own-device policy and notebook computers and tablets quickly became a major part of learning. However, these rules have become increasingly difficult to implement, as our child has grown older. In our family, we have fairly strict rules around the use of internet-connected screens. Device use is a major contemporary education challenge for parents and teachers alike.
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