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.
In the study involving spyware,
for example, two professors of business administration at the
University of Vermont found that “students engage in substantial
multitasking behavior with their laptops and have non-course-related
software applications open and active about 42 percent of the time.” The
professors, James Kraushaar and David Novak,
obtained students’ permission before installing the monitoring software
on their computers—so, as in Rosen’s study, the students were engaging
in flagrant multitasking even though they knew their actions were being
recorded.
Another study,
carried out at St. John’s University in New York, used human observers
stationed at the back of the classroom to record the technological
activities of law students. The spies reported that 58 percent of
second- and third-year law students who had laptops in class were using
them for “non-class purposes” more than half the time. (First-year
students were far more likely to use their computers for taking notes,
although an observer did note one first-year student texting just 17
minutes into her very first class—the beginning of her law school
career.)
Texting, emailing, and posting on Facebook and other social media
sites are by far the most common digital activities students undertake
while learning, according to Rosen. That’s a problem, because these
operations are actually quite mentally complex, and they draw on the
same mental resources—using language, parsing meaning—demanded by
schoolwork.
David Meyer,
a psychology professor at the University of Michigan who’s studied the
effects of divided attention on learning, takes a firm line on the
brain’s ability to multitask: “Under most conditions, the brain simply
cannot do two complex tasks at the same time. It can happen only when
the two tasks are both very simple and when they don’t compete with each
other for the same mental resources. An example would be folding
laundry and listening to the weather report on the radio. That’s fine.
But listening to a lecture while texting, or doing homework and being on
Facebook—each of these tasks is very demanding, and each of them uses
the same area of the brain, the prefrontal cortex.”
Young people think they can perform two challenging tasks at once,
Meyer acknowledges, but “they are deluded,” he declares. It’s difficult
for anyone to properly evaluate how well his or her own mental processes
are operating, he points out, because most of these processes are
unconscious. And, Meyer adds, “there’s nothing magical about the brains
of so-called ‘digital natives’ that keeps them from suffering the
inefficiencies of multitasking. They may like to do it, they may even be
addicted to it, but there’s no getting around the fact that it’s far
better to focus on one task from start to finish.”
Researchers have documented a cascade of negative outcomes that
occurs when students multitask while doing schoolwork. First, the
assignment takes longer to complete, because of the time spent on
distracting activities and because, upon returning to the assignment,
the student has to refamiliarize himself with the material.
Second, the mental fatigue caused by repeatedly dropping and picking
up a mental thread leads to more mistakes. The cognitive cost of such
task-switching is especially high when students alternate between tasks
that call for different sets of expressive “rules”—the formal, precise
language required for an English essay, for example, and the casual,
friendly tone of an email to a friend.
Third, students’ subsequent memory of what they’re working on will be
impaired if their attention is divided. Although we often assume that
our memories fail at the moment we can’t recall a fact or concept, the
failure may actually have occurred earlier, at the time we originally
saved, or encoded, the memory. The moment of encoding is what matters
most for retention, and dozens of laboratory studies have demonstrated
that when our attention is divided during encoding,
we remember that piece of information less well—or not at all. As the
unlucky student spotlighted by Rosen can attest, we can’t remember
something that never really entered our consciousness in the first
place. And a study last month showed that students who multitask on laptops in class distract not just themselves but also their peers who see what they’re doing.
Fourth, some research has suggested that when we’re distracted, our
brains actually process and store information in different, less useful
ways. In a 2006 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Russell Poldrack
of the University of Texas–Austin and two colleagues asked participants
to engage in a learning activity on a computer while also carrying out a
second task, counting musical tones that sounded while they worked.
Study subjects who did both tasks at once appeared to learn just as well
as subjects who did the first task by itself. But upon further probing,
the former group proved much less adept at extending and extrapolating
their new knowledge to novel contexts—a key capacity that psychologists
call transfer.
Brain scans taken during Poldrack’s experiment revealed that
different regions of the brain were active under the two conditions,
indicating that the brain engages in a different form of memory when
forced to pay attention to two streams of information at once. The
results suggest, the scientists wrote, that “even if distraction does
not decrease the overall level of learning, it can result in the
acquisition of knowledge that can be applied less flexibly in new
situations.”
Finally, researchers are beginning to demonstrate that media
multitasking while learning is negatively associated with students’
grades. In Rosen’s study, students who used Facebook during the
15-minute observation period had lower grade-point averages than those
who didn’t go on the site. And two recent studies by Reynol Junco, a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society,
found that texting and using Facebook—in class and while doing
homework—were negatively correlated with college students’ GPAs.
“Engaging in Facebook use or texting while trying to complete schoolwork
may tax students’ capacity for cognitive processing and preclude deeper
learning,” write Junco and a co-author. (Of course, it’s also plausible
that the texting and Facebooking students are those with less willpower
or motivation, and thus likely to have lower GPAs even aside from their
use of technology.)
Meyer, of the University of Michigan, worries that the problem goes
beyond poor grades. “There’s a definite possibility that we are raising a
generation that is learning more shallowly than young people in the
past,” he says. “The depth of their processing of information is
considerably less, because of all the distractions available to them as
they learn.”
Given that these distractions aren’t going away, academic and even
professional achievement may depend on the ability to ignore digital
temptations while learning—a feat akin to the famous marshmallow test.
In a series of experiments conducted more than 40 years ago,
psychologist Walter Mischel
tempted young children with a marshmallow, telling them they could have
two of the treats if they put off eating one right away. Follow-up
studies performed years later found that the kids who were better able
to delay gratification not only achieved higher grades and test scores
but were also more likely to succeed in school and their careers.
Two years ago, Rosen and his colleagues conducted an information-age
version of the marshmallow test. College students who participated in
the study were asked to watch a 30-minute videotaped lecture, during
which some were sent eight text messages while others were sent four or
zero text messages. Those who were interrupted more often scored worse
on a test of the lecture’s content; more interestingly, those who
responded to the experimenters’ texts right away scored significantly
worse than those participants who waited to reply until the lecture was
over.
This ability to resist the lure of technology can be consciously cultivated, Rosen maintains. He advises students to take “tech breaks”
to satisfy their cravings for electronic communication: After they’ve
labored on their schoolwork uninterrupted for 15 minutes, they can allow
themselves two minutes to text, check websites, and post to their
hearts’ content. Then the devices get turned off for another 15 minutes
of academics.
Over time, Rosen says, students are able extend their working time to
20, 30, even 45 minutes, as long as they know that an opportunity to
get online awaits. “Young people’s technology use is really about
quelling anxiety,” he contends. “They don’t want to miss out. They don’t
want to be the last person to hear some news, or the ninth person to
‘like’ someone’s post.” Device-checking is a compulsive behavior that
must be managed, he says, if young people are to learn and perform at
their best.
Rideout, director of the Kaiser study on kids and media use, sees an
upside for parents in the new focus on multitasking while learning. “The
good thing about this phenomenon is that it’s a relatively discrete
behavior that parents actually can do something about,” she says. “It
would be hard to enforce a total ban on media multitasking, but parents
can draw a line when it comes to homework and studying—telling their
kids, ‘This is a time when you will concentrate on just one thing.’ ”
Parents shouldn’t feel like ogres when they do so, she adds. “It’s
important to remember that while a lot of kids do media multitask while
doing homework, a lot of them don’t. One out of five kids in our study
said they ‘never’ engage in other media while doing homework, and
another one in five said they do so only ‘a little bit.’ This is not
some universal norm that students and parents can’t buck. This is not an
unreasonable thing to ask of your kid.”
So here’s the takeaway for parents of Generation M: Stop fretting
about how much they’re on Facebook. Don’t harass them about how much
they play video games. The digital native boosters are right that this
is the social and emotional world in which young people live. Just make
sure when they’re doing schoolwork, the cellphones are silent, the video
screens are dark, and that every last window is closed but one.
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University, and MindShift, a news website focusing on innovations in education and new trends in teaching and learning.
