When students type furiously during lectures, some are hanging on the lecturer’s every word. Others are texting their friends about Friday night.
Here’s a good reason for students to leave their smartphone, tablet or laptop out of sight: Using devices in class can impact students’ long-term retention of information, according to a new study from Rutgers University.
What happened: Researchers studied 118 cognitive psychology students during one term. They wanted to see if students who had access to personal devices including phones, laptops and tablets would perform worse on exams, given previous research found that dividing your attention makes tasks harder.
The students attended class in two “sections,” back to back, and had the same instructor. During those classes, they took a quiz on what they had just learned. In half of the sessions, they were not allowed to have any electronic devices available for personal use.
What they found: Students who had personal devices performed about the same as those who didn’t, when it came to the end-of-class quizzes. But when students had to answer questions about those lessons on a final exam at the end of the semester, they did worse than those who had no devices during class.
The difference was about 5% on their exams, equal to half a letter grade. The personal devices even affected students who weren’t actually using them, but were surrounded by classmates who were texting or emailing friends. Bottom line: Long-term retention “is being compromised,” the researchers said.
“The instructor often noticed two students giggling as they together viewed an image on a laptop,” they wrote. “It seemed that such behavior would be distracting to individuals around them.”
Other takeaways: Smartphones can erode concentration at work too. Previous studies show that people check their phone every 15 minutes or less and, as soon as they check in it will take upwards of 20 minutes to return to the task they were working on.
Between answering personal emails and texts, online shopping, and watching sports, employees report spending 42 minutes per day on other personal tasks. This adds up to 8 hours a week, and $15.5 billion in lost productivity, according to a 2017 study from staffing firm OfficeTeam.
Personal devices aren’t the only thing that can distract students during class. Air conditioning can actually help students perform better, according to a recent working paper the National Bureau of Economic Research distributed. In schools without air conditioning, every 1 degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature correlates to about a 1% decrease in learning.
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