Pioneer

Issue date: 1/28/10 Section: Campus

Media Credit: Stacy Wagoner Of 100 students polled, 56 percent of them said that they text while in class. Most of them claimed to be multitasking and don't believe that it disrupts their learning process.

If a student were to listen carefully in the classroom, he might hear buttons clicking faintly, the murmurs of texting all around him.

Many students text constantly throughout the day, and those habits bleed into the classroom.

When asked whether or not said students consider their habitual texting to be a distraction, many said something along the lines of, "It's called multitasking."

That well may be, but a recent study from Stanford suggests people shouldn't be so confident in their ability to multitask.

The researchers at Stanford put about 100 students through a series of three tests to determine what "gift" it is multitaskers possess.

The study found those who multitask do not switch from one job to another, pay attention, or control their memories as well as those who choose to focus on one task at a time.

In each task, the subjects were split into two groups: those who normally do a lot of media multitasking, and those who don't.

In the first experiment, the groups were shown sets of two red rectangles alone or surrounded by two, four or six blue rectangles. Each configuration was flashed twice, and the participants had to determine whether the two red rectangles in the second frame were in a different position than in the first frame.

They were told to ignore the blue rectangles. While the low multitaskers did not have any trouble doing so, the high multitaskers were constantly distracted by the blue triangles.

After two more tests, the researchers found the high multitaskers had overall poorer performances than the low multitaskers.

When asked, 56 percent of Pierce students surveyed said they do text in class.

While most of those who text in class admit it may be disruptive to the learning process, those who disagreed boiled it down to one thing: multitasking.

"If I feel the urge [to text] in class, then the class itself is not particularly engaging, and I'm not learning much from the lecture anyway," student Joey Schultz said. "It's a better outlet than talking in class, because it doesn't disrupt other people."

Continued...

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