Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
the Internet, and television. Our educator participants often reference the typi-
cal student practice of partially listening to the educator's talk while engaging
with multiple programs open on the computer and texting. According to one
visual arts educator, this situation characterizes their work environment and now
is what students need to—or feel that they need to—have access to before they can
concentrate.
For many of our educator participants, multitasking seems to indicate a decrease
in focused time spent on specific tasks. Several educators link multitasking with dis-
tractions; they claim that such distractions contribute to a change in students' ability
to compartmentalize and to stay on task. Additionally, according to several educator
participants, students today appear to have more difficulty attaining and sustaining
concentration on a particular task. There is also research supporting the claim that
multitasking comes at a cost to depth and attention (Fried, 2008; Hembrooke & Gay,
2003).
The educators we interviewed differ in their views of the effectiveness and impact
of multitasking on student learning. Some students reportedly can balance all of
their multiple activities with little difficulty. More typical, however, is the student
who believes he is capable of adeptly balancing the influx of information but in
fact struggles and does not succeed. Other educator participants suggest that multi-
tasking potentially impacts both the quantity and the quality of student work. One
physics educator attributes students' tendency to process “snippets,” or “little pieces
of information”—something many educators mention—to the culture of multitask-
ing, with the implication that students may lack the training to focus singly and
sharply over significant periods of time.
Another potential casualty of multitasking and fractured attention is a lack of
depth and facility for synthesizing information. Calling his students' approach to
information “surfacey,” a chemistry educator notices a recent decline in their capac-
ities to get a little frustrated and dig deeper. His students' ability to grasp, wrestle
with, and apply chemical concepts has not changed, but how they get there has. He
finds that they now look quickly at and analyze material less thoroughly. Similarly,
a theater educator claims that students can quickly process a lot of information that
exists on the surface, but the implications of that information may elude the student.
A biology educator observes that her students increasingly do not want to take the
time to process, and instead, they look to her for more direct guidance. Going a lit-
tle further, a history educator proposes that a big change with the current generation
is that students today have more difficulty feeling comfortable with an interpre-
tative stance of their own. Their ability to synthesize and think independently is
accordingly hindered.
In part as a way to address attention issues, most of our educator participants
integrate a variety of teaching styles, adopt more student-centered activities, incor-
porate images as attention “hooks,” and/or insert more “commercial breaks,” in
the words of one chemistry teacher. One English teacher we spoke with suggests
that students develop better executive-level skills to counteract all the distractions,
yet she also acknowledges that focused attention remains a struggle for some,
particularly boys. Students still manage to complete tasks, though for many it seems
