Assignment 1

1042 Words3 Pages

One of the main reasons this research was conducted was to understand how multitasking on your computer during class affects the student and his/her peers around them. This research is very topical, considering that technology is becoming extremely prevalent in our everyday tasks. The results of this study provided that multitasking does have consequences on the student and their peers (Sana. F., Weston, T., & Cepeda, N. J., 2013). To begin with, the study proved that learning and understanding declined when multitasking was introduced (Sana, et. al., 2013). Another thing Sana, Weston, and Cepeda (2013) found was that comprehending the material presented during lecture was also disrupted when students were sitting near another student who was multitasking.
Due to the nature of this study, two separate, different, experiments were done with two mutually exclusive groups of participants. These experiments were based off of two key hypotheses. The first being that these researchers wanted to replicate a previous study performed on this topic, but in a more controlled manner (Sana, et. al., 2013). The second hypothesis that these researchers desired to test was how the multitasking of a classmate would indirectly affect a student’s learning ability (Sana, et. al., 2013). In their studies the researchers used the manipulation of either using a laptop to strictly take notes or to use the laptop and complete tasks while taking notes as the independent variable. The dependent variable for this study was measuring the student’s comprehension of the lecture material presented.
For the first study, the researchers used forty-four students attending a university in Canada who were taking an introductory psychology course. To com...

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...e or pay complete attention to it.
I think the variables were operationalized appropriately and adequately. One thing I would have liked to see is that the researchers repeated the experiment a few more times in order to make sure the results coincided during each experiment. One question I would pose is, how does multitasking affect students during a class they find interesting? My idea here is that if the lecture material presented bores students, they are probably more likely to drift their attention; thus becoming less involved in class and more involved with their neighbor’s computer screen. However, if the same experiment was tested in a class that the students found more interesting, would the results differ? Of course, to measure interest in a class, the experimenter could create a survey that would operationalize a student’s interest in said class.

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