Multitasking In College Essay

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Recommended: Distractions in classroom and student performance

The modern college student populace has many different names that propose that they are absorbed by new media technologies such as; “digital natives” (Prensky, 2001), “the Net generation” (Palfrey & Gasser, 2010), and “Homo Zappiens” (Veen & Vrakking, 2006). The universality, flexibility, and interactivity of new media technologies, such as emailing, text messaging, social networking sites, and online games, have become accessible almost any time and anywhere thanks to the invention of laptops and mobile devices (Karnowski & Jandura, 2014). This rate of high availability encourages these young students to engage in multiple activities at the same time. Multitasking with new media is found to be spreading rapidly amongst young students (Kononova, 2013). For example, Foehr (2006) …show more content…

Even with this new found distraction, interference with teaching in classrooms is an issue that existed long before computer technology was born. Other sources of distraction such as day-dreaming or working on other assignments can and will affect students’ academic performance, but is not as well studied as multitasking with different technologies. Research in the past has shown that there is a negative connection between media usage and academic performance (Chen, 2008). This kind of data is fairly unexpected, showing that the usage of video games, instant messaging, cell-phone conversation and text messaging can all be connected with low performance and bad grades (Anand, 2007). Many feel that the negative association with all of the new media technology is directly connected to multitasking. Like how Jacobsen and Forste (2001), found in their research that two-thirds of the students that responded to their survey reported multitasking, which increased

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