Demonstrating the impact of multitasking in the classroom

The advent of laptops, mobile devices, and ubiquitous connectivity in the classroom has created both opportunities and challenges for the learning environment. Students, often feeling that they are good multitaskers, will use their laptops to read e-mail or browse the web during classes. Telling students the results of multitasking research may convince some students not to become distracted, but experiencing it first-hand provides a more active learning approach to the lesson. The goal of this project was to design a meaningful demonstration of the negative effects of multitasking so that students would internalize the message and, hopefully, change their behavior, if necessary. In this demonstration students were assigned to three groups, one which had no computing distraction (students were asked to take notes on paper), one which had a single on-line distraction, and one group which had dual on-line distractions. All groups were told that distractions should not be allowed to interfere with their class work. At the end of the lecture, students completed a quiz on the material just presented to test their level of understanding. There was a significant effect on quiz performance. The group without distractions obtained higher quiz scores than either distraction group. End-of-semester feedback showed that 63.5% of the students reported modifying their behavior in class based on the demonstration.