The Ability Of Students For Multitasking

In the article “Can students really multitask? An experimental study of instant messaging while reading” by Bowman et al., (2010) the researchers, say that students are multitasking with electronics often while doing work. They conducted an experiment where college students read a passage and got an instant message before or while reading. The purpose was to see if the instant messages had an effect on reading comprehension. This article is interesting because the results from the experiment show us how we comprehend and perform on a task while being distracted.

The main focus of this paper is to summarize and analyze the research findings from the Bowman et al. (2010)’s experimental study as well as see how similar or different Jim Taylor’s article “Technology: Myth of Multitasking Is multitasking really more efficient?” is. Multitasking is doing two or more things at once and can be distracting. In previous findings on multitasking, Fried’s 2008 study (as cited in Bowman et al., 2010) states that people who multi-tasked frequently paid less attention in class and scored poorly on tests than others who didn’t multitask. In a different study in 2006 by Hrastinski (as cited in Bowman et al., 2010), it explains that when students used instant messaging to help them with classwork it actually enhanced the student’s online participation for that class.

However, in Contreras-Castillo et al., (2006) study (as cited in Bowman et al., 2010), it showed that students mainly used instant messaging for social media, and not for educational purposes. Bowman et al., (2010) predicted that students that were engaged with instant messaging while reading a typical psychology passage would take longer to read the passage and that they would also perform poorly on the test for comprehension. They proposed that multitasking has been found to be interfering with both the study time and performance in students. The key constructs that are in this experiment are when and if the students received an instant message. In this experiment, there were eighty-nine undergraduate college students, who were asked to read a 3828-word passage and in the end, they were tested with 25 multiple choice questions on their comprehension. The independent variable in the study was if a student receives an instant message and when they receive it.

The students were measured on how long they took to read the passage, read and respond to the instant messages, as well as answering the test questions. Students were randomly assigned to one of three different conditions: one group received instant messaging before they started reading, the second group received instant messaging while they were reading, and the third group did not receive any instant messaging at all. Having three different conditions helps to understand if the timing of receiving an instant message makes a difference in how long it takes to read and comprehend the passage. Having multiple groups can give us an option to see and compare the results from other groups. The researchers’ results were partially supported; yes, students can multi-task, but when compared to the other two conditions, it took students more time to read a passage when they received an instant message while they were reading.

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They found that there was no significant difference in performance when the students were tested for comprehension. It took students more time to read because when they received a message while reading, they didn’t have the option to reply later, so they had to stop what they were doing and respond to the message. The group that took less time to read were the ones who received the message before they started reading. This is because they didn’t have to worry about when they were going to get the message. The findings implied that the there wasn’t a problem in the students’ performance even when they got a message while reading, but they did take more time to read.

The limitations of this article were that they only used college students, they should have also used high school students as well to see if there are any similarities or differences. The length of the passage was a bit long and it could be shorter. The future direction for this research is to have a time limit on the readings, like a deadline, and give the students the choice to reply to the instant messages when they want to so it can be like real-life study conditions. This article and the article by Jim Taylor “Technology: Myth of Multitasking Is multitasking really more efficient?” are similar because they are on the same topic of multitasking. They both include multiple types of researches that were done on multitasking by others. The article by Bowman et al., (2010) is distinct from Jim Taylors’s (2011) article because this article is scholarly and a peer-reviewed journal, whereas Taylor’s (2011) article is a popular source and opinion based.

The evidence is more believable and stronger in the Bowman et al. (2010) article because as we discussed in class, scholarly articles are written by researchers who are professionals and are more knowledgeable in the field. In conclusion, students are always multitasking while doing work and think that they can easily do multiple things at once.

In this paper I summarized and analyzed the research findings from Bowman et al., (2010). The main purpose of the study was to see if instant messaging had an effect on reading comprehension. This article is important because the results from the study showed us how multi-tasking effects the students’ comprehension of the passage and how long students took to read the passage while being distracted. I would say a possible implication is to have students from elementary to college level and see how multitasking effects them. In the end, the experimental study shows that by multitasking it will take more time to comprehend and complete a task than when you focus on one task at a time.