Video Transcript

The Hidden Costs of Multitasking | How Bad Habits Can Sabotage Learning 

Hello everybody and welcome to this week's "From Theory to Practice" where I take a look at the research so you don't have to. The article I've selected this week is called "Medium Multitasking Reading Habits are Negatively Associated to Text Comprehension and Meta Comprehension" by Romero and colleagues. 

The Problem with Multitasking 

To understand this paper, we need to take a brief look at one of my favorite topics: multitasking. If you've worked with me at all, you know multitasking is horrible for learning and memory and comprehension. In fact, I call multitasking the single worst thing you can do for learning and memory, which somebody pointed out the other day—"Well, what if you lock a kid in a closet? That's pretty bad." Okay, so we'll call multitasking the single worst non-abusive thing you can do for learning and memory. 

When you multitask, you go slower. Your accuracy drops. Your memory tanks significantly. This is true when it comes to reading comprehension. If you multitask while you read, on average, your comprehension will drop over a quarter standard deviation, and if you multitask while you read, you need about half a standard deviation more time to simply get the same content, the same material as everyone else. So you can overcome multitasking while reading—you just need a ton more time to get there. So it's really neither effective nor efficient. 

Proximal vs. Distal Multitasking Habits 

The majority of research looking at multitasking during reading has explored what's called proximal action. This is: are you multitasking while you're reading? You're looking at a book and you're checking your messages at the same time. They're happening concurrently. 

These researchers of this new paper came in and said, "Well, wait a second. What about distal habits?" A distal habit is how you typically act when you do a task. So when you're reading at home, when you're just reading on your couch, how much do you multitask there? Now, when we bring you into a class, and when we say read without multitasking, you're only focused on reading. Do those distal habits, do the things you typically do at home, bleed into and start to impact your comprehension here? 

So again, we know multitasking during reading hurts, but this research asks: what about habitual multitasking outside of the classroom? Does that bleed into focused reading within a classroom? 

Study One: Long Passages and College Freshmen 

These researchers did three studies. In study one, they took a look at college freshmen, and they had these freshmen read one long passage in hard copy and one long passage digitally to see if there's a difference between digital and hard copy. 

Remember, these people were only reading, no multitasking during reading, and the researchers correlated this with their behaviors of multitasking outside of the classroom. Through following them and using questionnaires, they asked, "How often do you multitask while reading in your real life?" 

What did they find? They found that as distal multitasking goes up outside of the classroom, comprehension on both hard copy and digital text drops within the classroom, even though they weren't directly multitasking while reading. So we see that external habits can bleed into and start to impact learning performance within a classroom setting. 

As a second twist, these researchers then asked each of the participants to judge their learning. We call this a metacognitive judgment: how much do you think you learned from this passage? And what did they find? The more people multitask outside of the classroom in the real world, the more their confidence of what they just read and understood goes up. 

In other words, they think they learned significantly more than they actually did. So here we see not only does the habit of multitasking while reading in the real world impact comprehension, but it also impacts your ability to recognize how well you're performing, how much you are learning from the reading.

Study Two: Short Passages and College Freshmen 

In study two, these researchers said, "Okay, well wait a second. What if it's just because we used long passages?" So same thing. They took a look at college freshmen, but this time they were asked to read two short passages in hard copy, and two short passages digitally as well. So instead of long reading, these were just short passages like you would find on a standardized test. 

What did they find? The exact same thing—as distal multitasking goes up, comprehension and performance goes down, even though you're not multitasking in the moment. The same exact thing happened with judgment of learning: as distal multitasking goes up on these short passages, regardless if they're hard copy or digital, meta-comprehension goes up. You think you learned more, even though you learned less than people who don't habitually multitask. 

Study Three: Secondary Students 

In the third study, these researchers took a look at secondary students. They said, "Let's take it out of the university classroom, bring it to 7th to 10th graders." These kids had to read one short digital and one short hard copy passage. This was correlated to their behavioral habitual multitasking in the real world. 

And what did they find? The exact same thing—as habitual multitasking goes up, performance goes down. Here they also took a look at moderators. They examined background knowledge, reading comprehension skills, and sustained attention skills. They actually tested these kids' ability to sustain attention to see if maybe this multitasking effect could be offset by kids with good attention. 

What did they find? No impact whatsoever. It doesn't matter how good your attention is. It seems to matter how you are training yourself in your real life. That is going to bleed over into your classroom life. 

Implications for Teaching 

So now let's bring this back to us, to teachers, to the classroom. What does this mean for us? Well, I can think of three key things: 

First, print it out when you are reading something online. Digital tools have a lot more what we call "affordances" for multitasking. Basically, there's a lot more multitasking you can do on these machines versus hard copy, which have no affordances. You can either read or not read. Looking at research from the past, you find people learn better, comprehend more when reading hard copy text versus digital. This is why textbooks have not disappeared from education—we're going back to hard copy because it's better for learning. 

The second thing comes directly from this research: we learned that printing it out is not always enough. People who habitually multitask in the real world, whether they're reading hard copy or digital, will see a negative impact on comprehension. So printing it out is a good first step for proximal multitasking, but it doesn't address that distal multitasking. 

Here's where we recognize we've got to develop a counter-habit. We've basically got to train kids how to read and sustain attention while reading and practice that, drill that enough so that it can start to overcome behaviors, habits built outside of the classroom. 

What does this look like? Well, growing up we used to have 30-minute quiet reading time every day in the school I went to. That was our training ground, where every day we explicitly learned: this is how you sit, this is how you read, this is how quiet it needs to be to comprehend. Maybe we need to bring those ideas back so students know when I read in a classroom, it's going to look and feel different, and I'm going to behave differently than when I'm reading on a couch at home. 

Beyond Reading: Classroom Behaviors 

The third thing I think is to extend it beyond simply reading. How many other behaviors are we taking for granted that we might have to explicitly train, be more explicit with within the classroom? 

There was a time when behavior in school and behavior outside of school were somewhat similar, but I think that's very much changing now. And the way kids behave in the "real world" seems to be very different than the way we need them to behave within a school in order to effectively and efficiently drive learning. 

So what other behaviors, what other actions, what other dispositions do we need to drill, practice, train a little more explicitly than we may have thought to overcome the growing gap between real world behaviors and classroom behaviors? 

Teaching Social Behaviors 

This makes me think: when I was back in South Australia last year, a lot of schools were teaching young kids, primary year students, how to line up, and people were up in arms about it. People were writing op-eds for the paper saying, "This is draconian. How dare you treat kids like this? This isn't a prison camp, this is a school." To which I respond: how else do you think we learn this stuff? 

We do not come into the world knowing how to behave in different situations. We've learned it through time. If we decide that there are certain social behaviors, certain social norms you need to enact within a school to make sure we can all do what we're there to do, then we have to explicitly train. We have to explicitly drill. We have to line kids up, and we have to expect they're going to fail for maybe a year, two years. They're going to stink at lining up, but we're going to keep drilling it. We're going to keep doing it so they learn this is how you behave in a classroom if you want to learn, if you want to make sure that people around you can learn. 

As adults, we take this for granted. We act differently at home than we do at work. We act differently at the supermarket than we do in our own kitchen. We're really good at changing our behaviors to match our contexts. But this wasn't inborn. This was stuff we had to learn. This was stuff we had to hone. We were taught this by adults. We struggled. We failed until we developed it, and can now drive it easily as adults. 

This has not changed. So it is not draconian to teach behaviors to students, especially if those behaviors are relevant and necessary for the act of learning within school. 

So thank you all so much for watching. I hope you got something good from that. If you like what you see, you can check us out online at lmeglobal.net or you can check out our award-winning Science of Learning Teacher and Student Programs, the Learning Blueprint. Otherwise, thank you all so much and I'll see you in the next one. Bye everyone.