Multitasking Among College Students

Students today are being brought up with wired and wireless distractions. (Richtel, November 2010). More and more students have cell phones, smart phones, and video games. They constantly simultaneously use multiple personal electronic devices to do such things as texting and updating their Facebook pages. The result of the constant fight for their attention has resulted in what former Microsoft executive Linda Stone calls "continuous partial attention." (Conley, 2011; Foehr, 2006). A recent development in higher level education is that many college professors observe their students being distracted by wired and wireless devices, while the professor is trying to lecture and attempting to have the students focus on learning or discussing a concept

On a typical evening, he worked on French homework while visiting his e-mail and Facebook, listening to iTunes, messaging a friend, and playing an online word puzzle (Hamilton). According to the story, Zach is a successful student, but many studies of multitasking suggest that he could be better if he focused on one thing at a time. While human beings are capable of doing two things at once if one of those things does not require much attention, like driving and drinking your morning coffee, there are some things that require a single focus, like school work. Multitasking between studies and recreational technology is not an effective way to

Some say that they feel they get more done in a shorter amount of time, but they are actually not doing two things at once. They are switching from one task to another, and constant task switching takes more time. Gloria Mark of the University of California Irvine conducted a study in which business workers were interrupted approximately every 11 minutes while working on a project. Each time, it took them about 25 minutes to return their attentions to the original project (Turgend). In study terms, if you interrupt yourself to check e-mail every ten minutes, a chapter that would take thirty minutes straight through takes over an hour to complete. What happens when people shift from one demanding task to another? David Meyer, a professor at University of Michigan, found that when you switch to a new task, the parts of the brain that are no longer being used “start shutting things down—like neural connections to important information.” If a student is studying French and interrupts to click open a message, the neural connections to the French homework start to shut down. To restore his level of understanding, Meyer says the student, “will have to repeat much of the process that created [the connections] in the first place” (qtd. in