The Effects of Multitasking in Learning Environment

From Hembrooke, H. & Gay, G. (2003). The Lecture and the Laptop: The effects of multitasking in the classroom. Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 15(1), 46-65. [link]

“Students in the open laptop condition suffered decrements on traditional measures of memory for lecture content”.

“Broadbent proposed that there is a limited processing channel that information is filtered from a sensory processing stage on it way to a short-term memory store or buffer.”

“In two studies, students performing multiple tasks performed significantly poorer on immediate measure of memory for the to-be-learned content”.

“In the follow-up analysis we discovered that page-relevant content di not predict better performance, and spending the majority of class time on class related content did not result in better test performances”.

“Grace Martin & Gray (2001) similarly found that longer browsing sessions throughout the course of the semester resulted in lower overall class perfomance, and that many and shorter browsing session during a class period, irrespective of content, led to higher class grades”.

“While students were obviously distracted by having access to the Internet, e-mail, IM, and browsing as evidenced by their performance on traditional tests of memory, their performance in the class overall does not reflect this same disruption.”

If students can become “better browsers”, or at the very least become more facile at self-monitoring their browsing behavior, the typical decrement found under multitasking conditions might be negated”.

Finally, these results clearly indicate the need for setting boundaries and stablishing “tech-etiquette” for using wireless technologies in the classroom. High-tech doodling for some students can defeat the purpose of using them in the first place”.