Examining the Affects of Student Multitasking With Laptops During The Lecture.

Kraushaar, J., & Novak, D. (2010). Examining the Affects of Student Multitasking With Laptops During the Lecture. Journal of Information Systems Education, 21(2), 241-251. Retrieved October 11, 2010, From Education Research Complete database.

This paper by Kraushaar and Novak (2010) looks at undergraduate student use of laptop computers in lecture theatres. The aim of this study is to look at the affects of multitasking during lectures and to ascertain weather multitasking (looking at non course related material and applications) has an effect on student learning outcomes. Data for this study was collected by student self reporting and through the use of spyware installed on students laptops. The idea of installing spyware on the students laptops was to be able to check the self reported data against the collected data fed by the spyware. The spyware was installed upon agreement with the participating students, and it was quite often disabled by students to hide what they were doing. There were 97 students who participated in the study and they were all undergraduates from the one faculty in differing years at Vermont University. The results were interesting as they show that students have non-course related material open 42% of the time and there seemed to be an under reporting of the multitasking as shown by the software data.  This is concerning for other studies that rely solely on self reported data. The correlation though between multitasking and academic achievement wasn't quite clear with one measure showing that it did affect academic achievement and another measure showing that it was unclear. This was a good study with some interesting results especially revealing the amount of non-course related material that is looked at during lectures, as this seemed especially high.