Taking on multitasking: students will continue to media multitask--to their own detriment. Nonetheless, teachers can limit the multitasking effect and improve learning
Publication Information
Author(s): Jerome L. Rekart
Source: Phi Delta Kappan. 93.4 (Dec. 2011): p60.
Full Text:
The average high school upperclassman reports spending between seven and eight hours a day using various electronic media, such as television and cellular phones. Of those eight hours, only about 25% is spent watching television, which means the rest is devoted to playing video games, using the computer, text messaging, etc. On average, students report that over one-third of the time that they're reading and over half of the time they spend completing homework on a computer they're also using at least two other forms of electronic media (Foehr, 2006). Thus, it can be presumed that a typical high school student routinely media multitasks while studying. Contrary to what may have occurred as recently as 20 years ago, today's students aren't focusing solely on assigned pages of reading or completing an assignment, but are jumping back and forth from homework to Facebook--updating both their own status ("I'm reading right now") and checking on updates from others - to a phone call to a text message (R U DONE TET?)
Given the pervasiveness of media multitasking, examining how it affects learning in and out of the classroom is important. Luckily, research from both cognitive psychology and neuroscience can provide important insights into what happens when students media multitask and how to combat negative effects on learning.
The multitasking brain
When one tries doing several things at once, as occurs with media multitasking, there is no choice but to divide attention. Because the total amount of attention available is limited, the amount of focused attention for any single task decreases as the number of demands increases. Changes in the amount of attention for tasks are caused by changes within the brain. When neuroscientists examine the brain's role in cognition, they focus on areas that show changes in different markers of activity, such as blood oxygen levels or the amount of a radioactive substance. Hypotheses about the importance of different brain structures for cognition are then based on relative changes in the amount of these markers. Thus, if an increase in the activation in the frontal cortex occurs when someone learns strings of letters, this suggests that this area is important for this type of learning.
The total amount of brain activity present when two tasks are attempted simultaneously seems to be less than the sum of brain activation that occurs when each task is completed in isolation (Just, Carpenter, Keller, Emery, Zajac, & Thulborn, 2001; Newman, Keller, & Just, 2007). In addition, the patterns of brainwaves look quite different (Mangels, Picton, & Craik, 2001) when individuals are asked to complete one task at a time compared with when they try to work on both simultaneously. Reductions in brain activation and the changes in brain waves that are seen during multitasking are accompanied by decreases in short-term learning and task accuracy.
Therefore, the impairing effect of multitasking upon learning may be related to reduced brain resources that are available to satisfactorily complete tasks when they're tried together.
Dividing attention reduces total brain activation and could "recruit" brain regions normally involved in habit or rote learning--the striatum--rather than regions such as the hippocampus that are necessary for acquiring the type of knowledge that's critical for academic success (Foerde, Knowlton, & Poldrack, 2006). This means that dividing attention by multitasking impedes learning and performance in the short-term and may, by underutilizing brain structures necessary for the correct type of learning, affect long-term memory and retention. The implications of these findings make it critical that educators and parents try to impress upon students the need to focus and reduce extraneous stimuli while studying or reading.
Certainly getting today's youth to turn off devices that may be antithetical to learning is no small task. Given the Net generation's comfort level, they may feel as though their performance on school-related work is unaffected by multitasking. Unfortunately, even when a task is mastered, true media multitasking impairs the performance of experts and novices similarly (Lin, Robertson, & Lee, 2009). Furthermore, because of multitasking-induced changes in the brain regions recruited for learning and long-term memory, even diligent students who multitask while completing homework may be jeopardizing their long-term success.
Distractibility in the classroom
So, dividing attention away from school has an effect on not just short-term performance, but perhaps long-term learning as well. But are there effects caused by excessive multitasking outside of school that can affect attention and learning in the classroom? An elegant study conducted at Stanford University suggests that time spent multitasking may be affecting how students pay attention in general. This study assessed the amount of time college students spent performing one task, computer word processing, for example, while using another form of media at the same time (Ophir, Nass,& Wagner, 2009).
Separating light from heavy media multitaskers, the study found that individuals who multitasked more often were more distractible than those who did so less often. Heavy multitaskers had more difficulty switching between stimuli than light multitaskers. This result suggests that frequent media multitasking may be affecting one's ability to switch focus between tasks that are important, such as a teacher's lecture, and those that may not be, such as extraneous sounds in a classroom (Ophir, Nass, & Wagner, 2009). These results may have far-reaching ramifications as they suggest that lifestyle choices may be changing how an entire generation attends to information. What happens when everything one encounters has an equal chance of grabbing attention? One possibility is that even irrelevant stimuli, which should be dismissed as unimportant, will grab the attention of students used to responding to random clicks, pop-up windows, and ring tones. Students who spend more time instant messaging are less likely to read and they report being more easily distracted while reading than students who instant message less. An increase in student distractibility presents a challenge for the lecturing teacher trying to maintain the focus of students as well as the student taking a test whose focus should be on the examination, but is routinely redirected to classmates tapping pencils and sighing in exasperation.
Proposed classroom solutions
Teachers everywhere openly lament shrinking attention spans and a lack of focus by their students. Professional educators know that an inability to pay attention will limit the amount and quality of learning that can occur. So, given changes in attentional control and the reliance on study habits that use brain structures that don't facilitate deep learning, what are teachers to do? Fortunately, teachers can employ several research-based strategies to grab and maintain attention and, in turn, facilitate learning in the classroom.
Strategy: Assess often
Teachers can use course-based quizzes and tests for more than assigning grades. Testing enhances learning. Formative assessments themselves have a pronounced and lasting effect on a student's ability to learn, retain, and retrieve information. The frequent and routine quizzing of knowledge throughout a term can more than double student performance on final exams.
Though the significant learning gains obtained by testing frequently would make this particular strategy a best practice for all students, evidence demonstrating its effectiveness when individuals are multitasking reinforces its importance as a pedagogical strategy in the modern classroom. The testing effect likely works by reactivating and strengthening brain pathways that underlie learning as well as giving students a chance to assess their own learning progress and styles. In addition to facilitating learning via the testing effect, frequent assessments also give teachers opportunities to reiterate and reinforce the importance of focusing attention vis-a-vis good study habits. In a time of worries about teaching to the test and concerns about long-term retention of information, frequent assessment of information throughout the year may be a critical pedagogical tool that actually reinforces learning and memory.
Strategy: Limit competing stimuli
Today's students are used to attending to multiple streams of information, which may make them more distractible than previous generations. Teachers can respond to such a trend by limiting items in the classroom that may distract student attention. An informal audit, conducted by the teacher who knows her students and class best, is recommended to remove potentially distracting stimuli. This audit should indicate what items in the class are critical for learning and which are not. Example questions to guide such an audit should include:
* Is the class well-organized?
* Is there clutter in shelves, the floor, etc.? what can be moved, removed, or organized?
* Are there too many posters or sings on the wall? Do the posters reinforce learning or pose potential distractions?
A careful consideration of the class environment may even uncover that some learning tools may actually be counterproductive. For example, Hem-brooke and Gay (2003) found that using laptops in a classroom may limit understanding and retention of course concepts. Students who used their laptops for course-related learning while listening to lectures actually fared worse than students who used their laptops during lecture to surf the web for non-course-related information.
Counter-intuitive findings such as these indicate that it never hurts to re-examine practices and even class layouts with the goal of finding the best fit for optimizing learning. Anything that may unnecessarily divide attention or that could prove to be distracting should be considered for removal.
Strategy: Introduce novelty
Students are spending roughly one-third of their day immersed in environments where something new, be it a text message or e-mail, can and does pop into existence unexpectedly. How can standard lectures, seatwork, and recitation compete with the flash-bang-whiz novelty of video games and Internet sites? Class periods should be structured so students aren't just engaged at the beginning but consistently reengaged throughout a session. For example, rather than spending an entire class period lecturing about the fall of the Roman Empire and reading passages from a text, teachers can break the material to be covered into 10-to 12-minute modules with each module covering key concepts using a different instructional vehicle--a film clip, role play, pair-share activities, class debates, etc.
Many individuals have advocated using multiple approaches as a way to address different learning styles and as a best practice for general instruction. However, the novelty of using a modular approach is what's most important here. Incorporating the novelty throughout a single class session by using a modular approach is likely to engage the brain's medial temporal lobe, including the hippocampus, which has been found to be a kind of novelty detector. As indicated when discussing the selective recruitment of brain regions when multitasking, the hippocampus is critical for storing the type of new information necessary for academic success. Thus, by using multiple approaches, an educator not only grabs student attention via novelty detection but, due to a focus of attention, increases the likelihood that the student will store the conveyed information.
Closing thoughts
Research supports the popular notion that the attention of today's student is different from students of past generations. These differences, at a cognitive and brain level, are likely to become more widespread as smartphones and laptops are most likely here to stay. Because of the importance of attention for learning, we need to be concerned about the ramifications of widespread media multitasking. Classic and current research on best practices for teaching and learning suggest that it may be possible to counteract some attentional changes with sound pedagogical strategies, such as testing frequently, reducing unnecessary stimuli, and using multiple, novel instructional methods. What should not be overlooked, however, is that most researchers and teachers are designing studies and viewing students through lenses colored by a different age. Today's student may be paying attention in a different way, and so one must be careful not to assume that the ramifications are entirely negative. One effect of media multitasking is that students are paying attention to multiple stimuli rather than sustaining focus on just one stimulus. This has been referred to as a breadth approach, and it may yield benefits that have yet to be uncovered or realized. In addition, the ability of members of the Net generation to use current technology is likely to be critical to their own future success in the 21st-century job market. By employing evidence-based strategies to harness attention and facilitate learning, educators can help ensure that tomorrow's citizens have the knowledge and skills necessary to be successful in a multitasking world.
References
Foehr, U.G. (2006). Media multitasking among American youth: Prevalence, predictors, and pairings. Washington, DC: Kaiser Family Foundation.
Foerde, K., Knowlton, B.J., & Poldrack, A. (2006). Modulation of competing memory systems by distraction. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 103, 11778-11783.
Hembrooke, H. & Gay, G. (2003). The laptop and the lecture: The effects of multitasking in learning environments. Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 15, 46.
Just, M.A., Carpenter, P.A., Keller, T.A., Emery, L., Zajac, H.,& Thulborn, K. (2001). Interdependence of nonoverlapping cortical systems in dual cognitive tasks. Neuroimage, 14, 417-426.
Lin, L., Robertson, T., & Lee, J. (2009). Reading performances between novices and experts in different media multitasking environments. Computers in the Schools, 26, 169-186.
Mangels, J.A., Picton, T.W., & Craik, F.I.M. (2001). Attention and successful episodic encoding: An event-related potential study. Cognitive Brain Research, 11, 77-95.
Newman, S.D., Keller, T.A., & Just, M.A. (2007). Volitional control of attention and brain activation in dual-task performance. Human Brain Mapping, 28, 109-117.
Ophir, E., Nass, C., & Wagner, A.D. (2009). Cognitive control in media multitaskers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106, 15583-15587.
RELATED ARTICLE: Share these findings with students
The majority of time that students are media multitasking is spent away from school. Because of this, it's imperative that educators share with students and their parents the facts concerning multitasking, the brain, and learning.
JEROME L. REKART () is an associate professor of education and psychology at Rivier College, Nashua, N.H.