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Sahana Sellathurai

Examining the Affects of Student Multitasking With Laptops During the Lecture | Journal... - 0 views

  • We find that students engage in substantial multitasking behavior with their laptops and have non course-related software applications open and active about 42% of the time.
  • Although many students may believe they can switch back and forth between different tasks with no serious consequences to their academic performance, multitasking has been shown to dramaticaUy increase the number of memory errors and the processing time required to "learn" topics that involve a significant cognitive load
  • Although many students may believe they can switch back and forth between different tasks with no serious consequences to their academic performance,
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  • can result in the acquisition of less flexible knowledge that cannot be easily recalled and/or applied in new situations
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    Examines how students learn when using a laptop during their lectures.
Sahana Sellathurai

Multitasking Muddles Brains, Even When the Computer Is Off | Wired Science | Wired.com - 0 views

    • Sahana Sellathurai
       
      The experiment done to see how effective multitasking is.
  • In every test, students who spent less time simultaneously reading e-mail, surfing the web, talking on the phone and watching TV performed best.
  • college students who routinely juggle many flows of information, bouncing from e-mail to web text to video to chat to phone calls, fared significantly worse than their low-multitasking peers
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  • children doing worse on homework while watching television, office workers being more productive when not checking email every five minutes.
Rita Chen

Scholars Turn Their Attention to Attention - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Hi... - 0 views

  • Nass is skeptical. In a recent unpublished study, he and his colleagues found that chronic media multitaskers—people who spent several hours a day juggling multiple screen tasks—performed worse than otherwise similar peers on analytic questions drawn from the LSAT. He isn't sure which way the causation runs here: It might be that media multitaskers are hyperdistractible people who always would have done poorly on LSAT questions, even in the pre-Internet era. But he worries that media multitasking might actually be destroying students' capacity for reasoning.
  • is whether media multitasking is driven by a desire for new information or by an avoidance of existing information. Are people in these settings multitasking because the other media are alluring—that is, they're really dying to play Freecell or read Facebook or shop on eBay—or is it just an aversion to the task at hand?"
  • But those scholars also became intrigued by the range of individual variation they found. Some people seemed to be consistently better than others at concentrating amid distraction. At the same time, there were no superstars: Beyond a fairly low level of multitasking, everyone's performance breaks down. People can walk and chew gum at the same time, but not walk, chew gum, play Frisbee, and solve calculus problems.
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  • that is, their ability to juggle facts and perform mental operations—is limited to roughly seven units. When people are shown an image of circles for a quarter of a second and then asked to say how many circles they saw, they do fine if there were seven or fewer. (Sometimes people do well with as many as nine.) Beyond that point, they estimate. Likewise, when people are asked to repeat an unfamiliar sequence of numbers or musical tones, their limit on a first try is roughly seven.
    • Rita Chen
       
      this is really interesting, says we can't go beyond doing 7 things
  • ly easy, or I can do
  • something really hard."
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    Good article on studies pertaining to Multitasking
Vicky La

genM: The Multitasking Generation - TIME - 0 views

  • The mental habit of dividing one's attention into many small slices has significant implications for the way young people learn, reason, socialize, do creative work and understand the world. Although such habits may prepare kids for today's frenzied workplace, many cognitive scientists are positively alarmed by the trend. "Kids that are instant messaging while doing homework, playing games online and watching TV, I predict, aren't going to do well in the long run," says Jordan Grafman, chief of the cognitive neuroscience section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). Decades of research (not to mention common sense) indicate that the quality of one's output and depth of thought deteriorate as one attends to ever more tasks. Some are concerned about the disappearance of mental downtime to relax and reflect. Roberts notes Stanford students "can't go the few minutes between their 10 o'clock and 11 o'clock classes without talking on their cell phones. It seems to me that there's almost a discomfort with not being stimulated--a kind of 'I can't stand the silence.'"
    • Vicky La
       
      Jordan Grafman, chief of the cognitive neuroscience department of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, stated that kids tending to so many tasks at once will not do well in the long run.  According to research, the quality of output will be extremely affected as more tasks are attended to.
  • ALTHOUGH MANY ASPECTS OF THE networked life remain scientifically uncharted, there's substantial literature on how the brain handles multitasking. And basically, it doesn't. It may seem that a teenage girl is writing an instant message, burning a CD and telling her mother that she's doing homework--all at the same time--but what's really going on is a rapid toggling among tasks rather than simultaneous processing. "You're doing more than one thing, but you're ordering them and deciding which one to do at any one time," explains neuroscientist Grafman.
    • Vicky La
       
      Multitasking is "rapid toggling among tasks" and not "simultaneous processing".
Sarah Ngov

Media multitasking doesn't work say researchers | Reuters - 0 views

  • "Heavy multitaskers are lousy at multitasking... The more you do it, the worse you get," said Stanford communications professor Clifford Nass.
  • Compulsive media multitaskers are worse at focusing their attention, worse at organizing information, and worse at quickly switching between tasks, the Stanford scientists wrote.
  • After testing about 100 Stanford students, the scientists concluded that chronic media multitaskers have difficulty focusing and are not able to ignore irrelevant information.
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  • A bright side to such distraction may mean that the media multitaskers will be first to notice anything new, Ophir said.
  • Researchers who published the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences said the results had surprised them. They were looking for the secret to good media multitaskers but instead found broad-based incompetence.
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    Another article on why researchers like Clifford Nass believe that multitasking does not work.
Sahana Sellathurai

Multi-tasking Adversely Affects Brain's Learning, UCLA Psychologists Report - 2 views

  • Even if you learn while multi-tasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.
    • Sahana Sellathurai
       
      The experiment they did to test if multitasking is effective.
  • "Our results suggest that learning facts and concepts will be worse if you learn them while you're distracted,
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  • When the subjects were asked questions about the cards afterward, they did much better on the task they learned without the distraction.
  • The researchers noted that they are not saying never to multi-task, just don't multi-task while you are trying to learn something new that you hope to remember.
  • Listening to music can energize people and increase alertness. Listening to music while performing certain tasks, such as exercising, can be helpful. But tasks that distract you while you try to learn something new are likely to adversely affect your learning,
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    An article about multi-tasking and its affects, according to the psychologists at UCLA. Result : Do not multitask when learning something new. 
Sahana Sellathurai

Media multitaskers pay mental price, Stanford study shows - 1 views

  • keeping up several e-mail and instant message conversations at once, text messaging while watching television and jumping from one website to another while plowing through homework assignments.
  • the researchers realized those heavy media multitaskers are paying a big mental price
  • Everything distracts them
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    Stanford Researchers' study on Multitasking. They say heavy media multitaskers are actually paying a big mental price. 
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