Divided Attention
by Colleen Worrell, Secondary Technology Integration Coordinator
A recent article posted on Slate.com (You’ll Never Learn! Students Can’t Resist Multitasking, and it’s Impairing Their Memory” by Annie Murphy Paul)
confirms what most teachers and parents already know: doing homework
while texting, watching TV, and occasionally jumping on Instagram or
Twitter can be hazardous to a student’s grades. In fact, Victoria Rideout,
lead author of a research study by the Kaiser Foundation,
argues that it’s not the total amount of screen time we should be
worried about, but the overall time students spend “media multitasking”
while doing schoolwork. As she notes, “It’s multitasking while learning
that has the biggest potential downside.”
Why is media multitasking bad for students? The Slate
article points to research that documents “a cascade of negative
outcomes that occurs when students multitask while doing schoolwork”:
- “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”
- “the mental fatigue caused by repeatedly dropping and picking up a mental thread leads to more mistakes”
- “students’ subsequent memory of what they’re working on will be impaired if their attention is divided”
- “when we’re distracted, our brains actually process and store information in different, less useful ways”
- “researchers are beginning to demonstrate that media multitasking while learning is negatively associated with students’ grades” (Slate).
Beyond
grades, David Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of
Michigan, worries that “we are raising a generation that is learning
more shallowly than young people in the past. The depth of their
processing of information is considerably less, because of all the
distractions available to them as they learn” (Slate).
As
we evaluate the first year of HHS' 1-1 Laptop program and prepare for year two, teachers
and administrators are keeping this research in mind to make
sure we create a one-to-one environment that enhances learning, not detracts from it. I
wanted to share this article with parents to give you some
well-researched reasons for asking your children to focus their
attention on one thing at a time so they can devote quality time to
learning and to make schoolwork "count." As the Slate
article advises, “make sure when [students are] doing
schoolwork, the cellphones are silent, the video screens are dark, and
that every last window is closed but one.”
Image from Innovatively Organized.com
