Technology And Distraction Essay

Are you distracted? Maybe it's your phone or maybe you're listening to music, whatever you're doing, there is most likely at least one thing that is currently grabbing at your attention. In high schools throughout America, students are plagued with distractions that almost never stop. One of the most prevalent and detrimental distractions is technology. Technology is often misused in schools, by students. They are distracted by social media or internet games and often have a hard time focusing. Overall, technology affects students more harshly than positively.
To start, the main reason that technology can be such a distraction is multi-tasking. When students are switching through tabs to avoid a teacher's eyes or pretending to be listening to a lecture when they are playing games on their phone, they are multitasking. The ability to multitask is usually thought of as a good trait, however, in recent years, studies have revealed that it can be negative on your work to multitask. In a study by Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass, and Anthony D. Wagner on multitasking, it is shown that "HMMs (heavy media multitaskers) have …show more content…
If a student is doing something that distracts themselves, it is likely that it distracts at least one other person. A quote, from the study "Laptop multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers" by Sana, Faria, Tina Weston, and Nicholas J. Cepeda, states "We found that participants who multitasked on a laptop during a lecture scored lower on a test compared to those who did not multitask, and participants who were in direct view of a multitasking peer scored lower on a test compared to those who were not." This quote directly states that students within the radius of a distractor are similarly affected. The results of this study point out that the problem is not as much the technology, but more the students who misuse