The Impact Of Smartphone's Impact On University Students

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Smartphone Impact on University Students
The article, You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him learn: Smartphone use in higher education, is authored by five men who have backgrounds in Psychology, Electrical/Computer Engineering, and Educational Technology and was published in the British Journal of Educational Technology in 2015 (Tossell, Tortum and Shepard 713). The authors organized a study among college students that explored how smartphones impact their education (Tossell, Tortum and Shepard 715). It utilized real-time data-logging on iPhones as well as student surveys and self-reports (Tossell, Tortum and Shepard 715). After the study, the authors concluded that smartphones were slightly disadvantageous in achieving educational …show more content…

Prior to receiving their iPhones, the students, for the most part, predicted that their smartphone would aid them in doing schoolwork and obtaining high grades without any major negative impacts. Conversely, after the high initial interest in educational applications and web pages, many students began to use most of their screen time for idle entertainment such as Netflix, YouTube, and mobile games. This shift can be attributed to the vast amount of entertainment resources compared to the limited educational resources available on an iPhone. The authors suggest that each student’s idle time, now consumed by entertainment, could have alternatively been used for completing educational assignments or studying. By the conclusion of the study, the majority of students reported that their iPhone was a distraction from their educational goals. The smartphone’s role as a distraction is a most likely the root of the lower homework grades, test scores, and GPA; however, there is uncertainty since course difficulty was not controlled in the study because the study continued over two semesters. (Tossell, Tortum and Shepard …show more content…

They advocate that the chief problem in education may not be the amount of technology in the traditional classroom, but that it could actually be the traditional classroom setting in a world of technology (Tossell, Tortum and Shepard 722). Widespread technological advance means improved access to new information and more opportunities for informal learning. And, informal learning, according to Marcia Conner, is “a lifelong process whereby individuals acquire attitudes, values, skills and knowledge from daily experience and the educational influences and resources in his or her environment” (Marcia

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