Cell Phones In College Classrooms: Article Analysis

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The title of the article is: Perceptions of Mobile Phones in College Classrooms: Ringing, Cheating, and Classroom Polices. The title of this article is indeed straightforward. The purpose of the article is easy to understand. Anyone, regardless of major would be able to understand the study that has been conducted in this article. I believe the title did a wonderful job explaining all the different factors that were being studied in this experiment.

Campbell, S. (2006). Perceptions of Mobile Phones in College Classrooms: Ringing, Cheating, and Classroom Policies. Communication Education, 55(3), 280-294. doi:10.1080/03634520600748573

The abstract of this article was quick to point out the importance, purpose, and the initial findings of the study. This study is looking at a range of topics when it comes to having cell phones in classrooms. Despite the fact that this article is already ten years old, it still has issues that are relevant in our generation today. Colleges, students, and professors alike are still struggling with the distraction that cell phones can cause to individuals and those around them if they are getting a phone call. The research problems all revolve around trying to understand the boundaries of cell phone use. In this study, society is beginning to expand the acceptable use of cell phones, but this study focuses in on the use of cell phones in classrooms. By limiting the research to just classrooms the researchers have executed their jobs of delimiting the scope of the research. Their purpose is very clearly laid out. “Building from these lines of research, the purpose of this study was to explore instructor and student attitudes about mobile phones in college classrooms.”(Campbell) The author was able to achieve the goal with success. The literature review section was thin to say the least. At this time, cell phones were just on the verge of growing into the giant that they are today. However, the researchers were still able to find applicable research to expand upon. Their research questions stemming from the prior research was necessary due to the expansion of these cell phones. The hypothesis questions of the study were “How do students and faculty perceive mobile phone?” and “To what extent are participant characteristics (faculty/student status, mobile phone ownership, amount of monthly use, history of ownership, age, and gender) related to attitudes about mobile phones in college classrooms? “. These questions were appropriate because in order to figure out how acceptable cell phone usage is within the classroom, attitudes have to be measured; therefore these are perfect questions for the study. This study could be considered a quasi-experiment, due to the fact that the participants were not randomly assigned. In total one hundred
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In a 1999 study, it was found that the classroom is the least acceptable place for cell phones, however in this study, the younger generations were much more tolerant of them. The limitations of this study was that it only allows some evidence that cell phones are tolerated more by younger generations as they value them more, this does not prove it as fact though. The suggestions of the author are that the younger generations uses their cell phones more and so because of this, cell phones will more widely accepted in classrooms because it is the social norm. The author was not wrong in 2016, that is exactly the

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