To text or not to text; that is the question. As a student at Concordia, one realizes very quickly that some professors are fine with students using cell phones during class and others are quite set against it. A number of recent psychological studies have been done regarding multitasking via cellphone, and one response to the findings in these studies was Alberta’s infamous Distracted Driving Law. In December, 2013, we conducted a field experiment at Concordia to help answer the ongoing question of whether it really matters if cell phones are used during lectures in the classroom.
A professor agreed to allow our experiment to be conducted during two classes that studied the same material back-to-back on the same days. We created a true-false quiz based on two of the professor’s lectures. On day one, the first class happened exactly as it usually did except for students being asked to anonymously complete the quiz at the end of the class. The second class was given permission by the professor to text and use social media on their cell phones during the lecture, and they answered the same quiz at the end of class. On day two, the roles were switched – with the first class using cell phones and the second class occurring as usual without them – and both classes doing the second true-false quiz at the end.
Using gender and birth dates provided by students on their quizzes, each student’s score on the ‘with-cell-phone’ quiz was compared to their own score on the ‘without-cell-phone’ quiz. The results were tabulated, and the results definitively showed that students did better on the ‘without’ quiz. In fact, students did an average of 24% better without their cell phones!
The results of our experiment were statistically significant, and the odds that these results were a fluke are less than one in a thousand. So… maybe we will put our cell phones away during all of our classes, and not just the ones where the professor requires us to!