Multitasking In College Student Essay

Superior Essays
The topic of multitasking is important for all ages to get a hold off, but more specifically the age group of people currently finding themselves in college. Multitasking can come to fruition in many different scenarios, including learning in the classroom, while studying in the library, doing homework in your dorm room, or even driving down the street. Along with these different scenarios, a person can find themselves doing different things to distract them such as spending their time looking at social media, going through their emails, messaging friends, and many more. Performing multiple tasks at a time are daily life activities for many, whether they are aware of it or not. But what many people don’t understand is that these types of activities can be very distracting and inevitably affects their performance in everyday life.
Multitasking has various levels of interference, not
…show more content…
In a recent study done on college students in the classroom (Zheng, 2015), the study examined the relationship among learning variables, multitasking and academic performance. What they did was they followed students throughout the semester up until midterms to follow their classroom habits; most used laptops or other technology. They found that there was a specific connection between laptop multitasking in lecture halls and academic performance in a course that is based on lecturing. Multitasking had a stronger negative correlation on grades compared to self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, and test anxiety. This means for these students that out of all the factors that affect academics, multitasking has the strongest impact and in order for a student to excel on the testing portion of the academics, students need to be solely focused on the task at hand because otherwise it may lead to some negative

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Peter Bregman claims that multitasking isn’t aas productive as we think it is. Bregman offers multiple examples of study results, showing that multitasking would slow down a person’s productivity level up to 40 percent. In order to support his claim, Bregman conducted a one week experiment where he would try not to multitask and see what happens. He would also jot down methods or techniques to help prevent people from multitasking. For the whole week, Bregman has maintained himself from multitasking and he discovers six things.…

    • 252 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Multitasking Dbq

    • 719 Words
    • 3 Pages

    With the dawn of the 21st century, multitasking has become ingrained in the American culture. Being able to focus all of one’s attention on the task at hand is no longer the social norm. Instead, people’s concentration divides between a myriad of goals from emailing coworkers to listening to presentations to playing Solitaire. Even if multitasking has become a lifestyle for Americans, is it truly beneficial? Although skeptics attest that multitasking is inefficient or even impossible, practice shows that the ability to divide attention or accomplish multiple goals at once is essential to creating a personalized system of education and learning, as well as staying at the forefront of an adapting world and the constant innovation of the workplace.…

    • 719 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Dr. Hollowell later states that the outcome of multitasking is that “the brain gradually loses its capacity to attend fully and gradually do anything” (728). As of now researchers are figuring out how the brain changes attentions. A study published in 2001 The Journal of Experimental Psychology showed that switching one 's attention between tasks resulted in time lost. Also if a something requires major concentration like the example given texting and driving, the few seconds it take for the brain to switch concentrations can have a fatal end. In conclusion, one must learn the art of single tasking, which teaches the brain that focus, can be time efficient and result in less…

    • 1176 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Multitasking as a College Student A first semester in college is a challenging experience for new students. It can be overwhelming sometimes, as students soon realize that this next step in their education is nothing like their experience in high school. The way students studied before and how they approached their courses is significantly different than what college has for them. After getting familiar with the campus and classes, the real challenge is being able to balance life and schoolwork, the student must be able to complete assignments in several classes, often being of different subjects and theory. Setting a social life aside, multitasking your college classes and personal life can be challenging.…

    • 657 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the article, “Multitasking Can Make You Lose ... Um ... Focus,” Alina Tugend claims that instead of multi-tasking we can learn to stick with single-tasking. The author stated in the article “that the next time the phone rings sit on the couch and don’t focus on anything else but the conversation (Tugend). She says this because she makes it well known in the article that multi-tasking is bad for others. She explained her opinion on multi-tasking by showing studies that have been done.…

    • 1151 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the article Mini-Multitaskers it discusses many different things and brings up a lot of interesting points. The article starts off detailing how most youth believe that multitasking boosts your productivity, when in reality there is no boost and it actually takes longer to get things done while multitasking. The article then goes on to say It’s not only at home that kids are multitasking, they are also doing it in the classrooms shown by reports by teachers seeing an increasing rate of cell phones and other electronic gadgets being used inside the classroom. Since text messaging during class isn’t just a high tech version of passing notes it its demand for attention shows that multitasking may impact student’s ability to learn as well. it…

    • 420 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Multitasking refers to the many different ways of retrieving and holding information. For example, television, radio, cell phones, printers, computers and others. When individuals are engrossed in…

    • 1290 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    in 2010. However, they specifically targeted how people adapt to multitasking, asking whether they could automatically make, or learn to make better choices in the activities that they chose to engage in simultaneously. Their three experiments were conducted on three different sets…

    • 1418 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    Joanne Simpson argues that “media multitasking” is damaging the students’ ability to focus, concentrate, and effectively communicate with others as well as working on other tasks. In which they have lost the ability to stay focused and effectively concentrate in what’s in front of them. In some positive way, it has affected the ability to multitask and complete everyday tasks successfully but it has created more stress in today’s younger community. In terms of communication, a student is not able to interact with others as they were to before. They are not able to go to a restaurant without touching their phones or even without looking at it and have a decent conversation like the good old days.…

    • 1706 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In her essay, Multitasking Can Make You Lose…Um…Focus, Alina Tugend discusses many effects of multitasking. We think that multitasking is a way to keep us more efficient, but in reality it may be doing just the opposite. Tugend says that,”psychologists, neuroscientists, and others are finding that it [multitasking] can put us under a great deal of stress and actually make us less efficient. It turns out that most of the time when we think we’re multitasking, we actually aren’t.…

    • 438 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Multitasking Effects

    • 607 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The negative effects of multitasking Multitasking is when a person does many tasks at once. Multitasking is something people do everyday or often. People text and drive,walk and read ,and listen to music while doing their homework. People multitask without realizing the negative effects that come with it.…

    • 607 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    If people are on various sites, it only means, that they usually pay attention to what is on the websites rather than what is around them. Multitasking is one thing that I do too, usually when I am doing homework, and watching videos or listening to music. It takes more time to finish my homework when I am multitasking when I am not doing anything else. Class is to learn and do what the professor says in class,…

    • 151 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Multitasking Benefits

    • 761 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Multitasking can be helpful and efficient when one properly prioritizes their assignments. Sometimes it feels as if there aren’t enough hours in the day to get things done; this is where my multitasking skills kick in. While doing chores around the house, I…

    • 761 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    The term “Multitasking” is becoming a problem in today’s society. Multitasking refers to one person performing two or more task simultaneously. People do not realize that when you are performing two or more task simultaneously, you’re not getting the full input on both tasks that you are performing 100 percent. Research shows we have a left side and right side to our brain and when combining more then one task at a time into the brain, can lead to physical and mental effects. Multitasking drains the brain and exhausts the mind, and, if left unchecked, criticize us to early mental decline and decreased incisiveness.…

    • 916 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Today people take multitasking to the next level and hardly ever engaged with just one certain thing. For one to gain knowledge they must actively engaged and focus on the topic they are learning about. When Steven Johnson states that, “modern television makes one smarter,” he forgot to account for how a modern day TV watcher actually watches television. In fact, watching TV actually promotes multitasking to viewers today. An article in The Guardian includes the scientific work of Russ Poldrack, a neuroscientist at Stanford, and he found that “learning information while multitasking causes the new information to go to the wrong part of the brain.…

    • 1240 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays