Based on these findings, we offer some practical advice for both teachers and students. Teachers should inform students of the results of this study. For example, including a short summary of our results in a course syllabus may allow students to make a more informed decision about their mobile-phone usage during class lectures. In many classroom settings, the instructor has little control over student mobile phone usage. However, we believe that instructors, by helping inform students of the potential consequences of their actions, can help educate students and perhaps lead them to making a more informed decision to not use their mobile phone while in class.
Although we did find statistically significant results, this study is not without limitations. The sample size was admittedly small, but we did find statistically significant differences for many of our hypotheses. Even on the tests with nonsignificant results, our observed power was typically at an acceptable level, roughly .80. Although the sample size was statistically sufficient for the analyses we intended to perform, future researchers should attempt to replicate these findings to establish greater ecological validity for the results. In addition, it might be beneficial to include a pretest to gauge student prior knowledge in the content area covered in the lecture. The prescreening questions used in the current study likely mitigated the effects of differential prior knowledge on the findings; however, future studies should explicitly examine how this variable potentially influences the effects of texting on note taking and exam performance.
Another limitation of the study could be the length and/or content of the video lecture. The video was approximately 12 minutes long and covered four different communication theories. It very well could be that too much information was presented in the video, or the pacing of the video was perhaps too quick. Using this design as a potential guide, future scholars should attempt to replicate these findings using a prerecorded lecture from an actual class. This step would add realism to the findings and would better account for the natural ebb and flow of a typical classroom lecture.
Finally, it is worth pointing out that use of simulated text/posts can itself be a limitation. Our study does not account for the content of the simulated messages but instead focused on creating simulated text/posts that would require the participant's attention to respond. Future studies could build on our findings by examining whether the content of texts/posts has an impact on student recall or note taking. For example, it would be interesting to determine if the context of the texts/posts plays a role in impacting student learning. It may very well be that an ongoing conversation taking place via texts/posts competes more for a student's attention than an innocuous status message. Pairing participants with friends who are instructed to send texts or posts while a lecture is being shown could provide a more realistic manipulation and could allow researchers to fully analyze variance in content for texts/posts in relation to learning outcomes. As noted previously, future studies should explore differential effects of texts/posts about course material with varying levels of salience to the lesson.