Multitasking Should Be Allowed In College

The essential argument goes: you’re not really multitasking; you’re just task switching. The standard recommendation: better to finish one task before moving on to another. While college professors are under increasing pressure to capture the attention of students during class, competing with the distractibility of laptops and mobile devices. Many students DO believe they can multitask-pay attention in class whilst surfing the internet, sending a message, or checking the status of something online. Faculty members themselves are often tempted by these same distractions in meetings and at conferences. The ability to multitask depends on the tasks we are doing. Some activities become automatic with sufficient practice. Others require deliberate attention. It may be possible to have a conversation with someone while walking across campus, but it is nearly impossible to have that same conversation while reading a book. When activities use cognitive processes, such as reading, talking, listening and writing, they cannot be done simultaneously. The good news is that we have tremendous capacity for focusing our attention exclusively on what we want and need to see or hear. The bad news is that our capacity for attention is limited. We often have roughly a 10-minute capacity before something needs to happen to regain …show more content…
Attending to multiple streams of information and entertainment while studying, doing homework, or even sitting in class has become common behavior among young people-so common that many of them rarely write a paper or complete a problem set any other way. The confusion of activity is the multitasking that psychologists rave