Laptops Study
1. Why did they do this study?
Based on the introduction, laptops can serve as important learning tools but may also hinder students’ learning abilities due to distractions and temptations by students to browse miscellaneous sites that do not pertain to the particular course. In the study, students completed weekly surveys of attendance laptop use, and aspects of the classroom environment. Students who did these studies spent a considerable amount of time attempting to multitask with social media sites while trying to fully engage in the class lecture. Also, multitasking is consistently sought in daily lives. People seek pleasure in completing multiple tasks simultaneously to increase efficiency. However, seeking to increase efficiency becomes useless when each act’s performance is degraded because not all the focus is on one individual act such as paying full attention in lecture. The issue has become a growing concern in as decades have passed. This current study investigated the effect of laptop multitasking on both users and nearby peers in a classroom setting. Another reason this study was conducted was to prove that limits to resources, that are required for simultaneous tasks, mean the quality and efficiency at which multiple tasks are processed will be compromised.
2. What did they do?
In one experiment, it was investigated whether multitasking on a laptop would hinder learning as measured by performance on a comprehension test. One student would have to take the comprehension test while using the laptop to complete a secondary task such as using an alternative web browser, as students would normally do during lecture. Another student would take the comprehension test without using the laptop to multitask. Of course, it was hypothesized that the student without the multitasking would perform better. Also, another experiment was conducted so that one student had to be looking at another student with a laptop while taking the test and the other not.
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... overhead projectors, multifunctional libraries and comfortable self-study rooms for students. Therefore, both students and lecturers learning and teaching in these ... The last point is that data need to be tested for their rationality. To do this, the researchers read ... their most regularly performed tasks on campus. To generate rich information, the questionnaire for this study was composed to contain ...
3. What did they find?
There were control variables in this experiment such as the demographic differences between participants of the two conditions in terms of age, gender, fluency in English, or high school GPA. Overall from the test they discovered participants who multitasked scored 11% lower on a post-lecture comprehension test in experiment 1. And also, those in view of another laptop scored 17% lower on a post lecture comprehension test. Quite surprisingly, more students in view scored lower than even the laptop owners.
4. Why does it matter?
This introduces one important finding and introduces a new finding as well. First, participants’ comprehension was impaired when they performed multiple tasks during learning, one being the primary task of attending to the lecture material and taking notes, and the other being the secondary task of completing unrelated online tasks. This discovery suggests that despite actively trying to learn the material,, these participants were placed at a disadvantage by the choices of their peers.
