Episode 54: Does Digital Multitasking Impact Student Achievement?

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Take the quiz today. Foreign welcome to another episode of K12 Education Untangled. My name is Dr. Kim Fields, former corporate manager turned educational researcher and advocate, and I'm the host of this podcast. I got into this space after dealing with some frustrating interactions with school educators and administrators, as well as experiencing the micro discriminations that I faced as an African American mom raising my two kids who were in the public school system. I really wanted to understand how teachers were trained and what the research provided about the challenges of the public education system. Once I gained the information and the insights that I needed, I was then equipped to be able to successfully support my children in their educational progress. If you're looking to find out more about current information and issues in education that could affect you or your children, then you're in the right place. Thanks for tuning in today. I know that staying informed about K12 education trends and topics is important to you, so keep listening. On today's episode, I'll be discussing Attention Training and Digital Multitasking Getting a child's attention in order to focus on learning can be a daunting task, especially given the amount of technological distractions that exist in their environment. Attention training applications have shown minimal promise for for increasing attention. Likewise, decreasing digital multitasking is an ongoing issue. I examined the research in these areas of attention training and digital multitasking in order to uncover the findings about how to address these two concerns that impact cognitive development. Let's get started. Attention is an essential basis of learning. Students must filter through a large amount of distracting information that's coming from both the external environment and their own minds in order to focus during academic activities. One source of distraction is mind wandering, which is not only disrupting learning, but is highly prevalent in academic settings. Another source of distraction is from digital media, which is used by roughly 99% of adolescents on a daily basis in the United States. This is known to interfere with learning when used in the classroom. There's considerable research that indicates that attention is also relevant to a student's mental and emotional health. Mental health issues can also be exacerbated by frequently dividing a person's attention or across multiple media sources, a behavior known as media multitasking. It's also worth noting that mental health issues are on the rise among adolescents in educational settings. The most widely researched form of training attention is mindfulness based attention training, which usually involves both the development of attentional self skills as well as instruction on how to apply those skills to relate effectively to thoughts and emotions. Attention training may reduce mind wandering, enhance performance of academic tasks, improve emotional regulation and promote greater mental health. Unfortunately, only a small fraction of high school students receives this type of training. Mindwatering seem to occur more frequently than multitasking from digital media, but it's often very difficult to determine when mind wandering occurs as it is an internal event. However, there tends to be an increase of multitasking during class time. One of the results from this 2020 study was that a significant reduction in mind wandering might increase a student's susceptibility to multitasking. Attention plays a significant role in the management of stress and emotions. Attention dictates what aspects of the situation are noticed as well as how a situation is appraised. A new program in Cincinnati hopes to improve driver's education by helping young drivers with attention deficit disorders learn to focus. The aim is to reduce the time that students with attention deficits or looking away from the road for four or five seconds down to two seconds. The pediatric psychologist at Cincinnati's Children's Hospital led a study on the use of forward concentration and attention learning or focal program and the results so far look promising. While this program targeted drivers with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder such as, some experts argue that skills based simulations like this may help boost the effectiveness of driver's education programs in general. This would be helpful because statistics indicate that driver's education programs often don't actually reduce young drivers crashes in their first few years on the road. The first year of independently licensed driving is the riskiest time for negative outcomes in a teen's lifetime. Teenagers who have just traded their learner's permit for a license are more likely to slam the brakes, abruptly, swerve and make hard turns. Schools should think about driver's education as an opportune time to engage with parents and create opportunities for those parents to build upon and reinforce what the driving instructor has been talking about or doing with the team in driver's education class. In 2015, the FTC settled with the Texas based Focus Education Company because the company inappropriately claimed its Jungle Rangers computer game had scientifically proven meant memory and attention training exercises that give students the ability to focus, complete schoolwork, homework and to stay on task. The FTC also announced in 2015 a 2 million dollar settlement and a 50 million dollar judgment for misleading advertising against Lumos Labs Inc. The creators of Lumosity, a suite of computer and app based brain training programs. Their in house research didn't prove that its video games could improve school work and athletic performance as its advertisements had claimed. Lumosity is one of the best known programs intended to help students improve working memory which is the system the brain uses to hold information during decision making and analysis. Lumosity's studies and many other studies across the brain training field had increasing problems showing that the improvements in scores on the games actually transferred to better learning memory and attention beyond them. Some of those studies found that many programs did improve short term working memory skills, but the improvements were not sustained and the skills didn't translate into more general cognitive skills associated with working memory such as attention control, verbal and nonverbal ability or word decoding. Students and adults could regularly improve speed and accuracy on training tasks, but the further the task was from complex real life attention and decision making less those benefits transferred. The general premise is that interventions such as focused computer games can improve executive functions like attention, self control, mental flexibility and working memory with the assumption that boosting these will in turn boost students academic achievement. But this may be an overreach because there's no clear evidence that that improving executive function causes a boost in academics. At least according to a new analysis in 2015 Review of educational research based on 67 studies of executive function and achievement among children ages 2 to 18, there is some evidence that it's possible to improve executive skills using the school based program and higher executive function with was associated with higher academic performance at any given point in time as well as predicted future high performance. There was no correlation, however, for any of the individual parts of executive function or with some subject areas that were more complex than others. A study of computer based attention training seemed to suggest that interventions designed to improve academic performance also boosted executive skills. An analysis presented at the 2018 Annual Conference of the American Educational Research association or AERA indicated that multitasking on a mobile phone negatively impacts students learning recall, reading comprehension and reading speed. The worst effects came from using social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. This analysis was a meta analysis that used statistical techniques aggregate the results of 29 prior studies on the topic that were published between 2003 and 2016. The studies involved a total of 1,925 participants and and found that mobile phone multitasking caused both divided attention, which is when people try to process more than one set of information at a time, and rapid switching attention when people's focus swings back and forth between different information sources. Digital natives, the generation who has grown up with mobile devices and the Internet generally have higher multitasking ability than their older peers, but they also have continuous partial attention. The students may actually perform best while actively multitasking, however, they tend to do worse when asked to focus on a single task. The worst negative effects of multitasking while using mobile phones when was seen on students reading speed. Smaller negative effects were seen on students ability to recall content from lectures. Instant messaging has been found to slow students reading, but their comprehension tended not to study so we've talked a little bit about the attention training earlier in the podcast and have now moved on from to multitasking as was described by the study and analysis that came out of the AERA conference. Moving on in the area of multitasking, we find that the pervasiveness of technology and social media, coupled with the fear of missing out on something important, has led many students to pay continuous partial attention to everything. But this has also resulted in their having difficulty concentrating deeply on anything. The bottom line is the brain can't be in two places at one time. People can't process two tasks simultaneously, and it also takes longer to multitask than it would to do the individual tasks one after the other over. According to researchers at Johns Hopkins University, when a person tries to do two things at the same time, each requires a choice. There's a brief bottleneck in the prefrontal cortex, which is the decision making part of the brain, and this causes a delay for the second task. That delay may only be milliseconds long in most situations, but the newer the task, the more dynamic the environment and the more intense the distraction, the longer it will take the brain to react. In the classroom, that delay can cause students to miss information or simply fail to fully take the information in. For example, if a student is reading a chapter and they have to answer a text message, their attention is on the chapter. When a text message or email alert goes off, the student has to switch attention to the phone or computer, read and understand the message, respond, and then return to the textbook. Part of the switch time is remembering what they were reading, getting their head back into the task of reading, and not just moving their eyes. Multiple task interference is more noticeable in children with ADHD because they have to respond, evaluate, and move along, and they typically have a harder time doing this. Younger people are generally better at multitasking than older people because working memory tends to peak in the early 20s. A psychology professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Daniel T. Willingham doesn't buy into the idea that students who grow up surrounded by technology have a need to to do more than one thing at a time. His position is that there's no reason to think that they're any better in multitasking than previous generations. Working memory depends strongly on how well you can control selective attention and ignore distractions. Have you heard of the marshmallow test? This was a famous study conducted by Stanford University researchers to test preschoolers self control by asking them to hold off eating one marshmallow for 15 minutes in exchange for two sweets at the end of the wait. Fewer than one third of the four year olds tested had the self control to wait, but those who did showed academic and social success in the years that followed. Well, texting seems to have become the new marshmallow test for older students, and it has similar results. Parents and educators can't simply remove technology and other distractions because they're too intricately woven into their children's and students daily lives, particularly in middle and high school. Ideally, students should learn metacognitive skills to help them understand when and how to switch their attention between multiple tasks or techniques. According to a 2019 survey of 225 educators from around the world who teach grades K through 12. The teachers were concerned that their students had developed nomophobia, the fear of being without a mobile phone or or textophrenia, the fear of being disconnected. 34% of the educators surveyed said that they were distracted by students use of mobile devices, including phones and tablets during class. 80% of the educators believe that their students multitask during instructional time, meaning that they were on their devices when they're supposed to be paying attention to a lesson. And 61% of teachers believed that multitasking affected students ability to learn. Teachers had a wide variety of ideas about how to fix the problem, ranging from suggesting that students just turn off their devices to allowing students to take a break during the class to check their devices. Only 56% of the educators surveyed said they had campus policies on devices and that those policies were followed. This indicates that schools should have strong policies in place to manage the use of devices, have common expectations for all classes, and explain those policies to parents as well as to students. It's no surprise that most students would rather do just about anything other than homework. It's also probably not a surprise that more than three fourths of middle school students spend three hours or more a day in front of a computer, television, or a cell phone screen. All this time with technology comes at the expense of homework, which the majority of students devote less than one hour a day to. One assumption of the study is that students will be doing their homework anyway. Apart from screen time.

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And this probably doesn't match up with reality. The study is also short sighted in that it doesn't necessarily account for the time students spend in front of the television or computer while doing their homework. And what about students who say they concentrate better when they listen to background music? This may be their perception, but the research suggests otherwise. Studies on students who multitask have found that they do not generally do any of the simultaneous tasks as well as they could. According to a study by advocacy and research nonprofit Common Sense Media In 2015, black children, impoverished children, and those with parents who had at most a high school diploma consume the most media. Conversely, children from white families, those from high income households, and those raised by parents with at least a college degree tend to consume slightly less media than their peers. The study divided the children into two cohorts, 8 to 12 year olds or tweens and 13 to 18 year olds or teens. American teens average about 9 hours of media per day and tweens about 6 hours per day. These figures don't include time spent consuming media related to school or homework. The total hours included listening to music. According to the survey, 76% visit teens listen to music, 60% text and 51% watch television sometimes or often while doing their homework. Children tend to thrive, especially young children, when they have a lot of language rich, warm and supportive interactions. If parents are spending too much time on their digital devices, devices that can displace those interactions and have a negative effect on the kids. There have been some small preliminary studies that have shown that parents that were distracted by their devices were harsher to their kids and their kids tended to act out more as a way to get their parents attention. A lot of public attention has been given to the amount of time that kids spend on digital media, but parents are also logging almost as many hours as their kids. Since kids are spending so much time online, what are they doing? Boys tend to spend much more time playing console video games, while girls spend 40 minutes more per day on average using social media. Remember also that using online media consists of four passive consumption such as watching YouTube videos, interactive consumption such as playing games or browsing websites communication such as chatting on various social media sites and creation using media to create and share writing, art, music, etc. Tweens and teens spend much more time on passive consumption while creation accounted for about 1% of their media use. So here are the action steps that you can take it doesn't take much to notice that we're living in a day and age where attention spans are shrinking for adults and children. The research is clear. Attention training and reducing digital multitasking both contribute to academic success. Here are some things that you can do to increase your child's attention span and mitigate media multitasking. A 2018 study in the British Medical Journal indicated that limiting children's time spent watching screens to less than two hours a day or would improve their cognition. The screens include phones, tablets, video consoles and television. Incorporating about 60 minutes of daily physical exercise was also shown to increase cognition. The research indicated that additionally, sleeping 9 to 11 hours a night is extremely beneficial for children. The study found that these three recommendations when they were adhered to the better a child's cognition meeting only the screen time recommendation or both the screen time and sleep recommendations had the strongest association with cognitive development. So make sure that your children have less than 2 hours of screen time per day, participate in about 60 minutes of physical activity per day and sleep at least 9 to 11 hours every night as these three things will help increase cognitive development. There's also a powerful no tech, social and civilizing medium that increases attention and reduces digital multitasking. And it's called conversation. Talk to your kids to find out what's going on in their lives. Ask them questions about how their day went, what went on in school, what they thought about what went on in school, how they're feeling, etc. Just listen. This is applicable for young children and even teenagers. And even though teenagers may act like they're not listening to your responses, they are. Lastly, a key strategy to use regarding your child's use of media is to simply supervise and monitor their time online. You can put restrictions around their access to certain sites on the devices that they use at home. Here are this episode's takeaways in educational settings. The most widely researched form of training attention is mindfulness based attention training, which usually involves both the development of attentional skills as well as instruction on how to apply those skills to relate effectively to thoughts and emotions. Attention training may reduce mind wandering, enhance performance of academic tasks, improve emotional regulation, and promote greater mental health. Unfortunately, only a small fraction of high school students receives this type of training. Black children, impoverished children, and those with parents who at most have a high school diploma consume the most media when compared to their white peers. Children who claim to be good at multitasking actually do worse at remembering key details and filtering out irrelevant information compared to those who don't multitask or do so infrequently. The worst negative effects of multiple multitasking while using mobile phones was seen on students reading speed. Smaller negative effects were seen on students ability to recall content from lectures. Parents and educators can't simply remove technology and other distractions because they're too intricately woven into their children's and students daily lives, particularly in middle and high school. Ideally, students themselves should learn metacognitive skills to help them understand when and how to switch their attention between multiple tasks and technologies. If this is the type of subject matter and discussion that resonates with you, please follow my podcast onward whatever service you're listening to this also, I'd love to hear from you, so please leave me a rating, a review, or a comment on Apple Stitcher or Podchaser. You can also rate my podcast at Rate this Podcast.com if you like my podcast, the best way to support me and help me grow it is by leaving a review. This helps my rankings and entices other people to listen to the show. And be sure to share this episode with anyone that you think will find it valuable. Be sure to tell your friends, family and community about my podcast. Thanks for listening today. I hope you'll come back for more K12 educational discussions with even more exciting topics to untangle. Be sure to stay tuned on the next episode. I'll be sharing my thoughts on the importance of setting boundaries. Until next time. Aim to learn something new every day. Foreign my show. Consider being a regular subscriber. You can subscribe for as little as $3 per month. Just go to HTTPs://forward/tinyurl.com forward/podcast support there's no contractual obligation you can cancel at any time. If you choose to subscribe, I'll give you a special shout out thanking you in an upcoming episode. Remember, that's tinyurl t. Com podcast support. To subscribe.