To say that technology has increased multitasking qualifies as a classic understatement. People walk and text, they talk and check Facebook, they shop during lunch, and they study with headphones on. At this time in our culture, it’s permissible to be on your phone anywhere.
The motivation to do two (or three, or more) things at once is understandable. It’s a question of efficiency. If grocery shopping can be accomplished while finalizing birthday party plans, that’s two tasks finished in a single time window. However, a great deal of research challenges the perceived efficiency of multitasking. Participants in research studies take longer to complete tasks performed concurrently than when those same tasks are performed sequentially. In addition to that, doing two things at once frequently compromises the accuracy and overall performance of both.
Of particular concern to those of us in education are the effects of multitasking on learning. Researcher Terry Judd pinpoints the problem: “Cognitive studies of multitasking typically involve simple, discrete, well-defined tasks and are usually carried out in tightly controlled experimental situations. Student learning, on the other hand, takes place in a diversity of settings and often involves complex, ill-defined tasks” (p. 359).
There is research underway that explores the effects of multitasking in classroom and study settings. So far, Judd writes, “almost without exception, these studies have reported negative impacts of multitasking on learning outcomes” (p. 359). That’s the case whether the study looks at multitasking in the classroom or when students are studying on their own.
Judd’s work (some of it completed with colleagues) makes an important distinction regarding multitasking. It’s not the same as task switching, when a person switches from one task to another but does not return to the previous task. Multitasking occurs when the person switches to and from one task within a series of tasks and does so on more than one occasion. At the opposite end of multitasking is focused attention, in which learners (in this case) stick with the study task.
Judd studies multitasking, and his work referenced below involved the computer use of medical and biomedical students in an open lab setting at a large urban Australian university. Students were unsupervised in the lab setting, but usage logs documented what the students were doing while they were on the computers. It’s a large, complex study and, like so much research in these areas, already dated vis-à-vis the fast pace of technological advancement.
It’s still worth a look for the way it analyzes and classifies different multitasking behaviors: classic multitasking, mixed multitasking, or hybrid behavior. Classic multitasking occurs when student switch back and forth between two core tasks. For example, a student in the study would be on the university’s LMS and then switch to Facebook and then back to the LMS. Mixed multitasking happens when students combine one or more repeated tasks with several to many unique tasks. For example, a student browses learning resources, regularly checks Facebook, edits a Word document, searches for references or information needed in the Word document, and responds to an email. In hybrid multitasking, a student focuses on a task (for example, studying the textbook), then switches tasks (stops studying the textbook) and uses multitasking behaviors (checking email, viewing a website, going back to the textbook, taking a phone call, using an app to play a game, and then returning to the textbook).
Students in this study were much more likely than not to multitask during a session at the computer. In fact, just over 70 percent of the computer sessions analyzed involved some level of multitasking (p. 363). And the most frequent kind of multitasking was at the level that involved the most movement between tasks. “If computer-based multitasking during self-directed learning is as commonplace as our data suggests, then it follows that the effectiveness of students’ study per unit of time will suffer. More time and effort will be required to result in the same level of memory encoding, and learning, during a multitasking session than a focused or sequential one” (p. 366).
The stakes are high when student are multitasking and attempting to learn. It’s not an activity without consequences, for both students and their teachers.
Reference: Judd, T. (2013). Making sense of multitasking: Key behaviors. Computers & Education, 63, 358–367.
