The new marshmallow test: Resisting the temptations of the web By Annie Murphy Paul This story also appeared at: Living rooms, dens, kitchens, even bedrooms: Investigators followed students into the spaces where homework gets done. Pens poised over their “study observation forms,” the observers watched intently as the students—in middle school, high school, and college, 263 in all—opened their books and turned on their computers. For a quarter of an hour, the investigators from the lab of Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University-Dominguez Hills, marked down once a minute what the students were doing as they studied. Photo by Erin Scott Although the students had been told at the outset that they should “study something important, including homework, an upcoming examination or project, or reading a book for a course,” it wasn’t long before their attention drifted: Students’ “on-task behavior” started declining around the two-minute mark as they began responding to arriving texts or checking their Facebook feeds.
Reading Club | Digital Distraction How many times will you check Facebook, Twitter, your e-mail, or another tab on your Internet browser as you read this post, and what does that do to your ability to absorb what you read? How does this “rapidly toggling between tasks” affect our brains in general? Does dividing our concentration this way change how we learn? For the final installment of our Reading Club this year, we offer a pair of articles — one from The New York Times’s Sunday Review and the other from the KQED Mind/Shift blog — that detail new research on the potential costs of this “rapid toggling” that most of us engage in every day. Though we’ve posted about this topic before via everything from lesson plans to our Student Opinion questions, we thought these two articles, read together, would be perfect for the more formal student response we ask for in our Reading Club feature. We have a few basic rules and guidelines that you should read in full.
Freedom, digital distraction and control Annie Murphy Paul has an excellent article in Slate and this publication this week about the issue of digital distraction while learning. A recently published study by psychologist Larry Rosen found that in a short 15-minute period of observation, teenagers spent only 65 percent of their time studying. Their attention drifted after an average of 2 minutes from reading and writing their assignments to activities like Facebook, texting and instant messaging–and all this was while they knew they were being watched. Digital distraction or multitasking is a modern scourge, not just for young people. The question is what to do about it. Control by authority means putting the teacher and school in charge of students’ access to technology: banning cellphones in school, instituting “screens down” policies, and enlisting teachers to police students’ behavior from moment to moment. Control through technology means designing tools to nudge students in the direction of desired use.
Age of Distraction: Why It’s Crucial for Students to Learn to Focus Digital classroom tools like computers, tablets and smartphones offer exciting opportunities to deepen learning through creativity, collaboration and connection, but those very devices can also be distracting to students. Similarly, parents complain that when students are required to complete homework assignments online, it’s a challenge for students to remain on task. The ubiquity of digital technology in all realms of life isn’t going away, but if students don’t learn how to concentrate and shut out distractions, research shows they’ll have a much harder time succeeding in almost every area. “The real message is because attention is under siege more than it has ever been in human history, we have more distractions than ever before, we have to be more focused on cultivating the skills of attention,” said Daniel Goleman, a psychologist and author of Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence and other books about social and emotional learning on KQED’s Forum program.
Kids' Self-Control Is Crucial for Their Future Success Self-control—the ability to regulate our attention, emotions and behaviors—emerges in childhood and grows throughout life, but the skill varies widely among individuals. Past studies have reported that self-control is partially inherited and partially learned and that those with less self-control are more likely to be unemployed, engage in unhealthy behaviors such as overeating, and live a shorter life. A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA tying childhood self-control to health and well-being in adulthood suggests that everyone, not just those most lacking the skill, would benefit from a self-control boost. Psychologist Terrie E. Moffitt of Duke University and her team focused on the self-control of a group of 1,037 children born in 1972 and 1973 in Dunedin, New Zealand. In addition to surveying and ruling out intelligence and socioeconomic status as possible explanations, the team explored whether differences in upbringing could play a role.
With Tech Tools, How Should Teachers Tackle Multitasking In Class? Important research compiled on the effects of students multitasking while learning shows that they are losing depth of learning, getting mentally fatigued, and are weakening their ability to transfer what they have learned to other subjects and situations. Educators as well as students have noticed how schoolwork suffers when attention is split between homework and a buzzing smartphone. Many students, like Alex Sifuentes, who admit to multitasking while studying, know the consequences well. Parents also see a big difference in their kids’ studying habits. “Devices that once were just an entertainment tool are also becoming our educational and work tools.” But for many, the solution isn’t simply to do away with the gadgets — mostly because they’re the same tools that actually help do the work, and it can be confusing for young adults to distinguish the difference between work and everything else. “Look, it’s not going away. “Look, it’s not going away. How will students stay focused?
How Does Multitasking Change the Way Kids Learn? Using tech tools that students are familiar with and already enjoy using is attractive to educators, but getting students focused on the project at hand might be more difficult because of it. Living rooms, dens, kitchens, even bedrooms: Investigators followed students into the spaces where homework gets done. Pens poised over their “study observation forms,” the observers watched intently as the students—in middle school, high school, and college, 263 in all—opened their books and turned on their computers. For a quarter of an hour, the investigators from the lab of Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University-Dominguez Hills, marked down once a minute what the students were doing as they studied. A checklist on the form included: reading a book, writing on paper, typing on the computer—and also using email, looking at Facebook, engaging in instant messaging, texting, talking on the phone, watching television, listening to music, surfing the web. Related
Divided attention and memory: evidence of substantial interference ... Classroom Laptop Users Distract Others As Well As Themselves Thursday, April 25, 2013 It won’t surprise anyone to learn that having a laptop computer open in a lecture class is an invitation to distraction for the user. But what about the students sitting nearby? A new study by a group of researchers at McMaster and York universities, both in Canada, finds evidence that laptop use in college classrooms distracts not just laptop owners, but their classmates as well. The researchers begin their article, published last month in the journal Computers & Education, by reviewing what we know about learning while our attention is divided: “Research suggests that we have limited resources available to attend to, process, encode, and store information for later retrieval. When we eventually retrieve information that was processed without interruptions, as a primary task, we are likely to experience minimal errors. These findings “are especially significant when considered in the context of student learning,” the authors note: The authors conclude: