Discussion
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Literature Review
Method
Results
Discussion
Conclusion
The goal of this study was to test whether or not texting/posting during a class negatively impacts students' note taking and subsequent performance on tests. Literature indicates that many students use their mobile phones, while in class, to send or receive text messages and post/respond to SNS content. Some studies (e.g., Lenhart, 2010) show that over 60% of teens with mobile phones have texted while in class. Previous research exploring laptop use during class lecture found a strong, negative correlation between student use of instant messaging services and quiz averages, project grades, and final exam grades (Kraushaar & Novak, 2010). Previous research has also observed that frequent texting during class influenced students' ability to attend to material being covered in that class and potentially results in decreased perceived cognitive learning (Wei et al., 2012). Results of the current study contribute new information to this body of literature by showing that texting/posting diminishes the number of notes recorded by students during lectures and results in subsequent impaired performance on various types of tests.
In this study, we posed four hypotheses, each predicting a negative linear relationship between the amount of texting/posting and students' scores on different learning assessments. The first hypothesis predicted that students' scores on a multiple-choice test would decrease as students text/post more. Results provide support for this hypothesis. The control group scored the highest on the multiple-choice test, followed by the low-distraction group and the high-distraction group. Although planned comparison tests did not show significant differences among each of the groups, the significant linear trend, pattern of means, and observed significant differences between the control and high-distraction group led us to conclude that hypothesis 1 was tenable.