How can discourage texting and Web-surfing in class?

Meg Gorzycki, Ed.D.

The Basics

Students regularly use electronic devices in their classes for non-academic reasons. As a result, students are distracted from class lectures, discussions, and presentations. Best practice requires student engagement.

In Practice

  1. In the syllabus and in the first one or two days of the course, discuss student engagement:
  2. Describe students’ responsibilities for attendance and participation
  3. Explain how listening and note-taking are active rather than passive responses to lectures
  4. Preview how the course requires more than the accumulation of declarative facts and how distractions in class may interfere with students’ mastery of knowledge and skills
  5. Establish policies regarding electronic devices in class, withexceptions for disabilities.
  6. Some instructors have banned the use of electronic devices with great success as they coupled the ban with instruction on how to take good notes and with abundant in-class exercises. Research indicates that students taking notes with laptops students tend to write the lecture verbatim, and that students who write them summarize ideas in their own words and use their own shorthand to synthesize information gathered in other venues. (Mueller, P. A. & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the laptop. Psychological Science, 25(6), 1159-1168).
  7. Help students understand that multi-tasking does not contribute to effective learning. This might include demonstrations or examples found on YouTube. Help them understand that social networking and Web-surfing distracts them not only from hearing what the instructor or classmates are saying, but from engaging in the metacognitive or internal conversation with oneself about the validity, meaning, and significance of what is being said or done.
  8. Introduce students to research concerning multi-tasking, and how it impacts cognitive development. Since many college students do not fully understand that their undergraduate studies are in part directed toward their own cognitive development, you may be the first to illustrate how multi-tasking interferes with both the quality of cognitive activity and long-term memories of declarative knowledge.
  9. Wood, E., Zivcakova, L., Gentile, P., Archer, K., De Pasquale, D., & Nosko, A. (2011). Examining the impact of off-task multi-tasking with technology on real-time classroom learning. Computers & Education, 58, 365-374.
  10. Heathcote, A., Eidels, A., Houpt, J. W., Coleman, J., Watson, J., & Strayer, D. (2014). Multi-tasking in working memory. In P. Bello, M. Guarini, M. McShane, & B. Scassellati (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 601-606).

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