The Effects Of Multitasking On Learning

Students are often challenged with multitasking in a classroom setting, such as taking notes, listening to a lecture, and interacting with their cell phones or laptops. As students are allocating their attention to multiple places at once, it is important that students still learn effectively. The purpose of this study is to understand how the recall of undergraduate students is being effected by this division of attention. Electronic devices, such as phones and laptops, are becoming an immense distraction in schools, and they appear to be negatively impacting learning (Carrier, Rosen, Cheever, & Lim, 2015). As students spend vast amounts of time listening to lectures and completing assigned readings, the use electronic devices increases

Literature shows that the networking generation is very involved in multitasking, but they are still showing no signs of improving. Students bring media multitasking into the classroom with them on a regular basis; this has negative implications on learning. Threaded cognition and cognitive load theory attempt to explain multitasking. Using these studies, past literature has been examining how multitasking impacts the human ability to retain information; thus negatively effecting learning. Our study was designed to examine the the effects of divided attention on long-term memory recall in undergraduate students. Our study will contribute to the implications of clarifying how divided attention (multitasking) has an impact on long-term memory recall and performance, and how it does this as multitasking challenges become more difficult. In this study, we expected that the best recall scores would be for words encoded in the control condition (single task), followed by words encoded in the easy dual-task condition, and finally by words encoded in the challenging dual-task condition.

The first limitation of our study is that the sample selected was a sample of convenience. As this was a relatively small university class at a small university, this may limit the generalizability of our results. Our methodology included only that of free recall, and recall can be effected by a number of items. If our test included other types of recall such cued recall or serial recall, our results may differ. Furthermore, some students may have a more difficult time focusing on the word lists or the math equations following the lists. If a student had a poor background in math, they may panic upon seeing the equations. Future researchers may want to test the effects of how other types of recall are effected by multitasking. Future research should also be based on a larger sample of undergraduate students, as they would improve the