Is Multi-tasking Impairing Our Students' Learning?

This morning on National Public Radio, in an interview titled “How Multitasking Affects Human Learning” Lynn Neary spoke with UCLA psychology professor, Russel Poldrack, about what occurs in the brain during multi-tasking. I’ve attached the link because it is important information that we must consider during our switch to lap top classrooms. Dr. Poldrack essentially says that students who are engaged in learning new information do better with focused attention. He blatantly states that multi-tasking impairs learning.

I recall the comment from Anne Smith’s blog, where a ninth grade honors student (kjerstinl) wrote about his/her experiences using Blogger and Skype in the fish bowl discussions. Kjerstinl’s reflections tie in beautifully with our discussions about laptop classrooms and the studies UCLA is conducting on the human brain. Here are portions of Kjerstinl’s comment:


"There are disadvantages and advantages to using Skype over Blogger. Skype is up-tempo and fast paced....Skype allows us to know what the others are thinking in 5 seconds or less. For me, I think that this helps develop my ideas more. It’s hard to explain though, because when we were on blogger, I had to think a lot harder on what I was going to say. Instead, on [Skype], my answers pop into my head quickly. ....We can get more accomplished with having more conversations, because we cover more ground on many topics. On our free time, we could go back and read the other group’s conversation too on what they discussed. There are a few problems about Skype though. One thing is that the inner circle [the students who are talking] doesn’t get as many people from the outside circle [the students who are using Skype and laptops] that come and join the conversation in the inside circle. I think we get so into the outside conversations that we forget that there’s another conversation going on. With blogger, things were so slow that it was easier to pay attention to the inside conversation. If we want to keep skype, we have to become better multi-taskers."

I am moved by our students’ heroic attempts to think more, know more, and to do it all more quickly, but I’m not convinced that multi-tasking is a benefit to their learning. Kjerstinl points out that with Skype, the class was able to “cover more ground on many topics,” but I wonder if the students had time to digest the complex ideas that Ms. Smith was trying to teach. Kjerstinl says, “On our free time, we could go back and read the other group’s conversation,” but I’ll bet the students rarely do this (mainly because they have no “free time”).

I know we can’t step back to the time when students would go home at the end of a day, retreat to a quiet bedroom, and read and meditate in silence. Those days are probably gone. But I’m not convinced that we are helping our students when we expect them to multi-task. To set up a class environment where students are required to speed up the pace of their thoughts and to be distracted by fragmented bits of information at the same time that they are trying to learn complex new ideas may ultimately impair their learning. Where do we allow students to ponder and reflect? Where is that serene environment?

Maybe the classroom of the future is a quiet place—with soft chairs and sound-proofed walls, where students can sit and think, where they can be still for a few minutes and allow their brains to process all that their machines crammed into them that day.