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How Does Multitasking Change the Way Kids Learn?

May 3, 2013 | 5:00 AM | By
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Using tech tools that students are familiar with and already enjoy using is attractive to educators, but getting students focused on the project at hand might be more difficult because of it.

Living rooms, dens, kitchens, even bedrooms: Investigators followed students into the spaces where homework gets done. Pens poised over their “study observation forms,” the observers watched intently as the students—in middle school, high school, and college, 263 in all—opened their books and turned on their computers.

For a quarter of an hour, the investigators from the lab of Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University-Dominguez Hills, marked down once a minute what the students were doing as they studied. A checklist on the form included: reading a book, writing on paper, typing on the computer—and also using email, looking at Facebook, engaging in instant messaging, texting, talking on the phone, watching television, listening to music, surfing the web. Sitting unobtrusively at the back of the room, the observers counted the number of windows open on the students’ screens and noted whether the students were wearing ear-buds.

Although the students had been told at the outset that they should “study something important, including homework, an upcoming examination or project, or reading a book for a course,” it wasn’t long before their attention drifted: Students’ “on-task behavior” started declining around the two-minute mark as they began responding to arriving texts or checking their Facebook feeds. By the time the 15 minutes were up, they had spent only about 65 percent of the observation period actually doing their schoolwork.

“We were amazed at how frequently they multitasked, even though they knew someone was watching,” Rosen says. “It really seems that they could not go for 15 minutes without engaging their devices,” adding, “It was kind of scary, actually.”

“I don’t care if a kid wants to tweet while she’s watching American Idol, or have music on while he plays a video game. But when students are doing serious work with their minds, they have to have focus.”

Concern about young people’s use of technology is nothing new, of course. But Rosen’s study, published in the May issue of Computers in Human Behavior, is part of a growing body of research focused on a very particular use of technology: media multitasking while learning. Attending to multiple streams of information and entertainment while studying, doing homework, or even sitting Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Research, Teaching With Tech, Larry Rosen, multitasking

How to (Once and For All) Correct Mistaken Beliefs

April 22, 2013 | 11:22 AM | By
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“Often mistaken, never in doubt.”

That wry phrase describes us all more than we’d like to admit. The psychological study of misconceptions shows that all of us possess many beliefs that are flawed or flat-out wrong—and also that we cling to these fallacies with remarkable tenacity. Although much of this research concerns misguided notions of how the physical world works, the techniques it has produced can be used to correct any sort of deficient understanding.

The most important thing to realize is that just telling isn’t enough. Most methods of instruction and training assume that if you provide students with the right information, it will replace any mistaken information they may already possess. But this just isn’t so. Especially when our previous beliefs (even though faulty) have proved useful to us, and when they appear to be confirmed by everyday experience, we are reluctant to let them go. Donna Alvermann, a language and literacy researcher at the University of Georgia, notes that in study after study, “students ignored correct textual information when it conflicted with their previously held concepts. On measures of free recall and recognition, the students consistently let their incorrect prior knowledge override incoming correct information.” It’s what our mothers called “in one ear and out the other.” Here, three ways to make that new information push out the old.

Highlight the mistaken notion. The simplest way to correct mistaken notions is to point them out as the accurate information is being presented. In a 2010 article in the International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, researcher Christine Tippett offers an example from a science book for children: “Some people believe that a camel stores water in its hump. They think that the hump gets smaller as the camel uses up water.  But this idea is not true. The hump stores fat and grows smaller only if the camel has not eaten for a long time. A camel can also live for days Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Research

Here Comes 2013: The Big Themes in Learning

January 4, 2013 | 10:21 AM | By

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Here are three big stories concerning education and learning that you’ll be hearing about in the year ahead—and some pointers on how to think about them.

1. SMART USE OF TECH.

Computers have been present in classrooms for a number of years now, of course, and in 2013 excitement about their potential to transform education will keep running high. Bulky desktop models will continue to give way to mobile devices like laptops, tablets, and even cell phones, and more schools will be experimenting with “BYOD”—telling students to “bring your own devices” to school. Innovative teachers and administrators will find ever more ways to integrate technology into instruction—from simulating science experiments on the screen, to turning boring math and vocabulary drills into enjoyable games, to promoting online collaboration among students on history and language-arts projects.

At the same time, the runaway enthusiasm about edtech will begin to be tempered, I predict, by a more realistic sense of what computers can do for students, and what they can’t. Young people will still need to interact with classmates and teachers face to face. They will still need physical activity Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods

Beyond Talent and Smarts: Why Even Geniuses Struggle

November 23, 2012 | 8:00 AM | By

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“The struggle with writing is over.”

That message, written on a Post-It note and affixed to his computer, brings the novelist Philip Roth great relief and contentment these days, according to a profile published earlier this week in the New York Times. At the age of 79, the author of more than 31 acclaimed books says he is finished with writing, and he couldn’t be happier. “I look at that note every morning,” he told Times reporter Charles McGrath, “and it gives me such strength.”

Fans of Roth’s books—which include Goodbye Columbus, Portnoy’s Complaint, The Human Stain, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral—may be surprised to learn that he regarded writing as a struggle at all.

His words flowed so easily on the page, and his books arrived with such frequency in the stores: at times, close to one every year. But behind that proficiency and productivity was arduous, unrelenting work. Roth told his interviewer that he’d enjoyed spending time with friends at his house in Connecticut this past summer: “In the old days I couldn’t have people in the house all the time. When they came for the weekend, I couldn’t get out to write.”

Americans have a complicated relationship with this kind of relentless striving. We extol the virtues of hard work even as we idolize the “natural,” the star who effortlessly achieves, who wins the race Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Research, Carol Dweck, Failure, Philip Roth

Why “Googling It” Is Not Enough

November 9, 2012 | 10:58 AM | By

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Has the Internet changed the way students conduct research? Yes, and not always for the better, reports to a study released last week by the Pew Research Center, “How Teens Do Research in the Digital World.” According to a survey of more than 2,000 middle and high school teachers, “research” for today’s students means “Googling,” and as a result, doing research “has shifted from a relatively slow process of intellectual curiosity and discovery to a fast-paced, short-term exercise aimed at locating just enough information to complete an assignment.”

While teachers in the survey acknowledge the benefits of the web for students—great depth and breadth of information, material presented in engaging multimedia formats, and the opportunity to become self-directed and self-reliant researchers—many of them express concern that easily-distracted students with short attention spans are not developing the skills required to do deep, original research.

From the report: “Some 77% of advanced placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) teachers surveyed say that the internet and digital search tools have had a ‘mostly positive’ impact Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Research, digital literacy, Pew Research, search

What Do Emotions Have to Do with Learning?

July 6, 2012 | 10:01 AM | By

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When parents and teachers consider how children learn, it’s usually the intellectual aspects of the activity they have in mind. Sidney D’Mello would like to change that. The University of Notre Dame psychologist has been studying the role of feelings in learning for close to a decade, and he has concluded that complex learning is almost inevitably “an emotionally charged experience,” as he wrote in a paper published in the journal Learning and Instruction earlier this year.

During the learning experiments described in his paper, he notes, the participating students reported being in a neutral state only about a quarter of the time. The rest of the time, they were were experiencing lots of feelings: surprise, delight, engagement, confusion, boredom, frustration.

Another counter-intuitive contention made by D’Mello is that even negative emotions can play a productive role in learning. In this latest study, he and his coauthor Art Graesser examined the effects of confusion. They asked their subjects to interact with a computer program featuring

Confusion motivates us to restore our equilibrium through thought, reflection, and problem solving, and deeper learning is the result.

animated agents discussing scientific case studies. The characters sometimes disagreed with each other, and sometimes conveyed information that was contradictory or just wrong. The students were then required to decide which agent’s opinion was correct. Subjects who reported feeling confused by the exercise actually scored higher on a test following the computer interaction, and when presented with new case studies, they were better able to spot the studies’ logical flaws.

Confusion, D’Mello explains, is a state of “cognitive disequilbrium”; we are mentally thrown off balance when we encounter information that doesn’t make sense. This uneasy feeling motivates us to restore our equilibrium through thought, reflection, and problem solving, and deeper learning is the result. According to D’Mello, engaged learners repeatedly experience “two-step episodes Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods