Use of Laptops in a Classroom Setting Has Adverse Effects Towards Retention of Academic Information

In today's day and age of technology, the majority of students in college own laptops for academic use. According to the empirical study titled "Laptop Multitasking Hinders Classroom learning for both users and nearby peers" done by Faria Sana, Tina Weston, and Nicholas J. Cepeda, laptops are used in order to access content that can aid a student in their studies, participate in academic activities, use programs to complete tasks, and is a piece of technology that can be seen as essential to a college student's success.

Bringing Laptops to Class Increases Multitasking and Distractions in Classrooms

Also according to the study, against the academic uses of laptops, students who bring laptops to class tend to multitask frequently during the class, posing a distraction to themselves in addition to other students around this person. These multitasking acts, primarily acts that have nothing to do with the subject of the lecture, harms the encoding of what information may have been said during the class, even when not directly affected by the multitasking leading to below average performance when the information needs to be regurgitated.

In my opinion, I do believe that the use of laptops in classrooms has many benefits. Through the use of the internet, one has access to many sources that can be used to aid and advance knowledge in a subject. Students can, at will, locate articles to explain a concept, search online libraries in order to research an area of interest, look at videos that can inform about innovative ideas, and even watch authentic lectures from accredited universities, and many of these cost little to nothing to access.

Through a computer the possibilities are endless, though the disadvantages associated with laptops in classrooms overshadow such benefits. Yes, laptops offer an abundance of access to academic sources, but computers also offer an abundance of access to things far from academics. The internet of today is full of things to do socially and for pleasure that totally opposes what one may see as important academically. Bringing a laptop to the classroom tempts students to do things other than that which relates to the content the professor is lecturing about far greater than a student who uses laptops in moderation or not at all in the classroom. Perhaps further legislation by professors can aid in the resolution of this issue.

The study done by Sana, Weston, and Cepeda experimented on two areas pertaining to laptop multitasking in classroom environments. The first experiment tasked half of the participants in the study to take notes on their laptops on a lecture given in live time. The other half of the participants were ordered to take notes on their laptops in addition to doing activities on the laptop not related to the lecture that simulated tasks that someone would actually do through a web browser. The overall goal of this experiment was to determine how multitasking directly effected the student who multitasked through evaluation on a test related to the lecture given afterwards. 

In the second experiment, a different set of participants were told to take notes using pencil and paper. Confederate participants were used in this experiment with the sole purpose of multitasking on laptops and were not included in the results of the experiment. Half of the participants taking notes on paper were in view of a multitasking confederate while the other half of the participants did not have an impeded view by the confederates.  A test was also given in this experiment to evaluate how being near a multitasking student effects those who are not multitasking during a lecture.

To ensure that all participants in the study stayed on task, mediators were present in the lecture hall during the experiment in order to enforce note takers to take notes and to enforce those assigned to multitasking to multitask.

The results from both experiments were identical. Those who either multitasked during the lecture or were in the view of a multitasking student scored significantly lower on the subsequent test given than students who did not encounter multitasking in any manner. Because of the extra and unnecessary stimuli that multitasking influences upon students, gathering information and storing it for later retrieval is much more subjected to error.  

What one can learn from this study is that multitasking is not a success promoter in the classroom. Doing multiple things at once on a laptop inhibits retaining of what is most important, not just for the one person doing the act, but indeed for anyone in the vicinity as well.

In order to lower the impact of multitasking, professors can implement ways for students to get away from doing things not related to the class. Interactive classroom applications such as Echo360, LectureTools, and NearPod create methods of limiting classroom distractions in addition to creating a more immersive learning environment. Through enacting programs such as these, the problem of multitasking can be a thing of the past.