Do Learners Really Know Best? Urban Legends in Education

This article takes a critical look at three pervasive urban legends in education about the nature of learners, learning, and teaching and looks atwhat educational and psychological research has to say about them. The three legends can be seen as variations on one central theme, namely, that it is the learner who knows best and that she or he should be the controlling force in her or his learning. The first legend is one of learners as digital natives who form a generation of students knowing by nature how to learn from new media, and for whom “old” media and methods used in teaching/learning no longer work. The second legend is the widespread belief that learners have specific learning styles and that education should be individualized to the extent that the pedagogy of teaching/learning is matched to the preferred style of the learner. The final legend is that learners ought to be seen as self-educators who should be given maximum control over what they are learning and their learning trajectory. It concludes with a possible reason why these legends have taken hold, are so pervasive, and are so difficult to eradicate

Media Multitasking Among American Youth: Prevalence, Predictors and Pairings

In recent years, the issue of media multitasking has sparked a broad discussion about the potential impact on children and youth and has raised concerns among non-profits about how best to engage young people with social marketing campaigns.To help advance understanding about the issues that surround media multitasking, the Kaiser Family Foundation hosted a forum, The Teen Media Juggling Act: The Implications of Media Multitasking Among American Youth.Forum participants included executives from MTV and eMarketer, a leading market research firm, along with one of the nation's top cognitive neuroscientists, and experts on media use among young people

The net generation and digital natives: implications for higher education

Executive Summary "Our students have changed radically. Today�s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach." (Prensky 2001 p1) 1. There is no evidence that there is a single new generation of young students entering Higher Education and the terms Net Generation and Digital Native do not capture the processes of change that are taking place. 2. The complex changes that are taking place in the student body have an age related component that is most obvious with the newest waves of technology. Prominent amongst these are the uses made of social networking sites (e.g. Facebook), uploading and manipulation of multimedia (e.g. YouTube) and the use of handheld devices to access the mobile Internet. 3. Demographic factors interact with age to pattern students� responses to new technologies. The most important of these are gender, mode of study (distance or place-based) and the international or home status of the student. 4. The gap between students and their teachers is not fixed, nor is the gulf so large that it cannot be bridged. In many ways the relationship is determined by the requirements teachers place upon their students to make use of new technologies and the way teachers integrate new technologies in their courses. There is little evidence that students enter university with demands for new technologies that teachers and universities cannot meet. 5. Students persistently report that they prefer moderate use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in their courses. Care should be taken with this finding because the interpretation of what is �moderate� use of ICT may be changing as a range of new technologies take off and become embedded in social life and universities. 6. Universities should be confident in the provision of what might seem to be basic services. Students appreciate and make use of the foundational infrastructure for learning, even where this is often criticised as being an out of date and unimaginative use of new technology. Virtual Learning Environments (Learning or Course Management Systems) are used widely and seem to be well regarded. The provision by university libraries of online services, including the provision of online e-journals and e-books, are also positively received. 7. Students do not naturally make extensive use of many of the most discussed new technologies such as Blogs, Wikis and 3D Virtual Worlds. The use of 3D Virtual Worlds is notably low amongst students. The use of Wikis and Blogs is relatively low overall, but use does vary between different contexts, including national and regional contexts. Students who are required to use these technologies in their courses are unlikely to reject them and low use does not imply that they are inappropriate for educational use. The key point being made is that there is not a natural demand amongst students that teaching staff and universities should feel obliged to satisfy. 8. There is no obvious or consistent demand from students for changes to pedagogy at university (e.g. demands for team and group working). There may be good reasons why teachers and universities wish to revise their approaches to teaching and learning, or may wish to introduce new ways of working. Students will respond positively to changes in teaching and learning strategies that are well conceived, well explained and properly embedded in courses and degree programmes. However there is no evidence of a pent-up demand amongst students for changes in pedagogy or of a demand for greater collaboration. 9. There is no evidence of a consistent demand from students for the provision of highly individualised or personal university services. The development of university infrastructures, such as new kinds of learning environments (for example Personal Learning Environments) should be choices about the kinds of provision that the university wishes to make and not a response to general statements about what a new generation of students are demanding. 10. Advice derived from generational arguments should not be used by government and government agencies to promote changes in university structure designed to accommodate a Net Generation of Digital Natives. The evidence indicates that young students do not form a generational cohort and they do not express consistent or generationally organised demands. A key finding of this review is that political choices should be made explicit and not disguised by arguments about generational change

Facebook® and academic performance

Kirschner, P. A., & Karpinski, A. (2010). Facebook® and academic performance. Computers in Human Behavior, 26(6),1237-1245.There is much talk of a change in modern youth – often referred to as digital natives or Homo Zappiens – with respect to their ability to simultaneously process multiple channels of information. In other words, kids today can multitask. Unfortunately for proponents of this position, there is much empirical documentation concerning the negative effects of attempting to simultaneously process different streams of information showing that such behavior leads to both increased study time to achieve learning parity and an increase in mistakes while processing information than those who are sequentially or serially processing that same information. This article presents the preliminary results of a descriptive and exploratory survey study involving Facebook use, often carried out simultaneously with other study activities, and its relation to academic performance as measured by self-reported Grade Point Average (GPA) and hours spent studying per week. Results show that Facebook® users reported having lower GPAs and spend fewer hours per week studying than nonusers

The new shape of the student

This chapter critically examines student characteristics in light of the popular dis-course which describes students as part of a net generation of digital native young people. Digital and networked technologies have clearly changed the possibilities for students to learn and the ways in which teaching and learning can be conducted. It is also claimed that new technologies change what students are able to learn. However the claim that there is a new generation of learners characterized by a new mentality has to be careful assessed in the light of recent empirical evidence. The idea of a generation gap between digitally native students and their digitally immigrant teachers is challenged, as are claims that pressure from this new generation forces radical institutional change on educational institutions. The chapter argues against the generational nature of the argument and separates the technological changes that are taking place from the determinist rhetoric they have been couched in. This rhetoric suggests that changes amongst students are already well understood and that their educational implications are already known and lead to generally applicable if not universal consequences. The chapter concludes by arguing that there is no one shape for students and that digital technologies open up a range of opportunities and choices at all levels of education

In-class Multitasking among College Students

The use of mobile devices in class has become a common scene on the college campus. The negative effects of in-class multitasking behaviors have been identified in many educational settings, including colleges. This study investigates the factors that drive college students to multitask and seeks to understand the relationship between learning engagement and multitasking behaviors in the classroom. This study also explores whether polychronic traits relate to multitasking behavior. A total of 282 survey samples were collected from college students in Taiwan. The results confirmed our hypotheses: (1) Students’ multitasking motivation, including social and emotional needs, positively relates to their in-class multitasking. (2) Polychronic traits positively relate to in-class multitasking. (3) Learning engagement negatively relates to in-class multitasking behavior. (4) Polychronic traits negatively relate to learning engagement. (5) Low course difficulty level relates to more frequent in-class multitasking behaviors. The implications of the study are also discussed

Examining the Effects of Distractive Multitasking with Peripheral Computing in the Classroom

The growing use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in college campuses has dramatically increased the potential for multitasking among students who have to juggle classes, school assignments, work, and recreational activities. These students believe that they have become more efficient by performing two or more tasks simultaneously. The use of technology, however, has changed the student’s ability to focus and attend to what they need to learn. Research has shown that multitasking divides students’ attention, which could have a negative impact on their cognition and learning. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of distractive multitasking on students’ attention and academic performance in a classroom setting. Several studies in cognitive psychology have focused on individuals’ divided attention between simultaneously occurring tasks. Such research has found that, because human attention and capacity to process information are selective and limited, a performance decrement often results when task performance requires divided attention. Distractive tasks are defined as tasks or activities for which cognitive resources are used to process information that is not related to the course material. Multitasking is defined as the engagement in individual tasks that are performed in succession through a process of context switching. Using a non-experimental, correlational research design, the researcher examined the effects of distractive multitasking, with computer devices, during classroom lectures, on students’ academic performance. This study used a monitoring system to capture data that reflected actual multitasking behaviors from students who used computers while attending real-time classroom lectures. The findings showed that there was no statistically significant relationship between the frequency of distractive multitasking (predictor variable) and academic performance (criterion variable), as measured by the midterm and final evaluation scores. The results did not support the hypothesis that distractive computer-based multitasking could have a negative impact on academic performance

Smartphones and Schoolwork: Determining the Relationship Between Students’ Beliefs and Habits Regarding Phones

This action research project investigated the relationship between students’ beliefs about the effects of using phones concurrently with schoolwork and the extent to which they engage in that behavior. Forty-five students from an independent school in southwestern Ontario participated in a study to determine their beliefs about phones’ effects on their schoolwork, and their responses were compared to observational data regarding how frequently they checked their phones during class. The results of the study indicate that, on average, students believe phones have little effect on their schoolwork, in contrast to current academic literature, which suggests an overall negative effect. This study also found that there is no correlation between students’ beliefs about phones’ effects on schoolwork and how frequently those students engage with their phones at school

Investigating Multitasking with Technology in Academic Settings

The presence of multitasking has become more and more prevalent in most if not all aspects of today’s society. This reoccurring display of multitasking is extremely prominent within the classrooms of our nation’s colleges and universities. While supposedly paying attention to lectures and taking efficient notes, students can be seen texting and/or using social media on their phones, or having a wide variety of possible tabs and windows pulled up on their laptops or tablets. This apparent habit of almost every higher-education level student has raised a multitude of questions in various fields of study over the years. It has also provided professors with yet another obstacle that they must overcome to effectively teach their students. In this study, we explore these issues and develop an extensive conceptual model outlining the factors that may impact multitasking with technology in academic settings