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.
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.
posted by Cheryl Makovsky at 11:14 AM
6 Comments:
Interesting thoughts. I think that some of these issues can be taken beyond the classroom and into our society today. I watch people eat, chat on the cell phone and drive. And you raise an excelent question, "Is multi-tasking a more efficient and better way to function/learn?"
Maybe some could argue that this comparison to learning and driving isn't fair, but is it? Am I really consentrating like I should be on driving if I am doing these other things?
And are students really consentrating on listening and thinking if they are doing various other things? Good questions to ponder :)
I think this is something we definitely have to pay attention to. My personal feeling after watching the kids use Skype and Blogger was that Skype was too fast, but that Blogger worked well (but that's obviously not very scientific and I'm also not looking at it as a student). I also think we have to be careful to distinguish between multi-tasking on separate tasks versus multi-tasking on related tasks. With the students blogging along with the discussion, they were related tasks, and I think that's very different than the study.
Here's the study:
"Participants in the study, who were in their 20s, learned a simple classification task by trial and error. They were asked to make predictions after receiving a set of cues concerning cards that displayed various shapes, and the cards were divided into two categories. With one set of cards, they learned without any distractions. With a second set of cards, they performed a simultaneous task: listening to high and low beeps through headphones and keeping a mental count of the highpitch beeps. While the distraction of the beeps did not reduce the accuracy of the predictions-people could learn the task either way-it did reduce the participants' subsequent knowledge about the task during a follow-up session."
I think most of us would agree that counting different kinds of beeps while looking at shapes and trying to make predictions at a later time is a significantly different exercise than blogging your thoughts and responses to a discussion on the same topic at the same time.
Also, it's still very early in this type of brain research. There are also studies that point to the increase in student's IQ's over the last two decades that point to increased media exposure and multi-tasking as a possible causal factor for that. In other words, that multi-tasking is making them smarter.
My guess is that none of the studies are conclusive enough yet to tell us much of anything, which is why we need to rely on our own observations and instincts at this point (and continue to pay attention to the research as it progresses). I agree that kids need time to think and reflect - which is part of my ranting about "covering the curriculum." But I don't think that necessarily conflicts with the type of multi-tasking that we saw with the kids blogging along with a fishbowl discussion. (And kids weren't required to speed up their thoughts, they could just sit back and listen and occasionally add their thoughts if they wanted).
Oh, and at least some of the students did go back and read at least some of those discussions, commenting at a later time. I think that demonstrates some engagement on their part.
I'd be all for that classroom with soft chairs and sound-proof walls where students could think and reflect. Have you seen any of those chairs around AHS lately? :-)
I think that the key is to help students figure out when multi-tasking is good, and when it is bad. Doing the laundry while dusting the house and emptying the dishwasher is the good kind - they are all relatively safe tasks that can be completed in stages. However, tasks like driving and talking on a cell phone are not good events to multi-task because each requires much concentration. I read about a study from the University of Utah which found that driving while talking on a cell phone (even a hands-free phone) is more dangerous than driving with a blood alcohol level of .06! Similarly, listening to rock music, instant messaging and studying at the same time isn't a good idea because each requires constant concentration. Let's stop multi-tasking for the sake of multi-tasking!
I think that the study brings up an important point that I often forget: just because this is what students are used to, doesn't mean we cannot have them work on focused work. I have found that my freshmen this year are even more of the 5-second-bit generation and really struggle and writing for even 15 minutes. This doesn't bode well for our upcoming CSAP testing!
Not sure if this connection is clear to anyone else, but it makes me think about the conversation we have about teaching literature--do we want real world connections or do we want cultural literacy? Obviously these are not polar opposites and there is plenty of balance to be had, but that's what it made me think of. Their world is already one of multi-tasking, so do we make it our job to expose them to a different sort of environment? Do we teach them to value serenity, concentration, and focus on one activity? I appreciate you making me think about this because I seem to cater to a multi-tasking generation when maybe what I should do is teach them how to be more focused individuals.
This is a very interesting topic being someone who does multitask a lot in the clssrooms here at school. I guess I would have to agree though that some of us would learn a lot better if we were focused on one thing at a time instead of adding things in our atenttion to focus on. Then again, some people would say that we students learn better when we have to focus on mulitple things. I only have one class that has laptops in it, my english class, and I don't really see a major change in the way I learn. However,
I couldn't see the same results in a science or math class where I need all of my focus on the teacher and the things they are saying for me to understand. My english class though, I have an easy time multitasking as I type on my computer and listen to my teacher or classmates at the same time. I know that some adults feel that we are too easily distracted when we have technology around, though some of us do. But I think that we have the ability to really focus on all of the things we are supposed to and succeed just as well if we did not use computers, maybe better.
I do think it would be interesting to think about your ideas on future schools and how they would be set up with quiet places and sound-proofed walls, where we can think better, and allow ourselves to let the information process all that we learned.
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