Does Multitasking Shorten Your Attention Span?
A recent Chronicle of Higher Education article reviews research into the effect of multitasking on memory and attention span. In “Divided Attention,” David Glenn considers the effect of media-multitasking in the classroom: those technology-wielding students who flip from screen to screen on their laptop, switching between Facebook, Freecell, and their lecture notes. Are they able to focus as well as their peers?
“In a recent unpublished study, [Clifford I. Nass] and his colleagues found that chronic media multitaskers—people who spent several hours a day juggling multiple screen tasks—performed worse than otherwise similar peers on analytic questions drawn from the LSAT. He isn’t sure which way the causation runs here: It might be that media multitaskers are hyperdistractible people who always would have done poorly on LSAT questions, even in the pre-Internet era. But he worries that media multitasking might actually be destroying students’ capacity for reasoning.”
As an educator, I often find it difficult to keep my students on task, even without the distraction of technology. Now that cell phones have become ubiquitous, it’s become nearly impossible: today I asked a student to put away his cell phone only to see him, moments later, reaching into his pocket, almost reflexively, to check another text message. Was this a product of my lecture? Or was he unable to focus because the buzzing cell phone in his pocket promised instant gratification, whereas my lecture on the importance of revision, alas, did not? “Divided Gratification” doesn’t provide any definitive answers to these questions, but it does introduce several worthwhile theories on the matter.
