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What Students Do While You Are Teaching – Computer and Smartphone Use in Class and Its Implication on Learning

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Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2021 (INTERACT 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12933))

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Abstract

The presence of mobile devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets and computers) in the classroom gives students the possibility of doing off-task activities during lectures. The purpose of this mixed-method field study was to learn more about students’ behaviors, reasons, and opinions regarding such activities and their consequences on learning. This study is one of few to take a holistic view on this topic by taking the use of all technical devices in class into account and assessing its consequences on learning objectively. This is important to gain a full picture concerning the consequences of off-task activities in class. Right after a lecture, bachelor students (N = 125) answered a survey containing questions on their usage of mobile devices during this last class. Furthermore, they took a test on the content of that lecture. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of data revealed that students spent an average of more than 19% of their time using a digital device for non-class purposes. Interestingly, this was not significantly linked with learning, although many students reported being aware of this behavior’s potential negative consequences. But there was a significant negative link between the number of received notifications and learning. These results suggest that external interruptions have a stronger negative effect than internal interruptions, allowing us to make better recommendations on how to use electronic devices in the classroom.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    There is a distinction between WhatsApp and other social media apps: WhatsApp is used primarily for communication while other social media apps offer other content. As for Facebook it is possible to make the distinction between Facebook and its messenger app, we would suggest coding the messenger app as communication and the social media app as social media when such a distinction is possible. In order to have the most fined grained analysis we chose to create a separate category for WhatsApp instead of coding it as social media or communication app.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland

    Carli Ochs & Andreas Sonderegger

  2. Bussiness School, Bern University of Applied Sciences, Bern, Switzerland

    Andreas Sonderegger

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  1. Carli Ochs
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  2. Andreas Sonderegger
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Correspondence to Carli Ochs .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Polytechnic University of Bari, Bari, Italy

    Carmelo Ardito

  2. Computer Science Department, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Rosa Lanzilotti

  3. Computer Science Department, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Alessio Malizia

  4. Department of Computer Science, University of York, York, UK

    Helen Petrie

  5. Computer Science Department, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Antonio Piccinno

  6. Computer Science Department, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Giuseppe Desolda

  7. Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA

    Kori Inkpen

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Ochs, C., Sonderegger, A. (2021). What Students Do While You Are Teaching – Computer and Smartphone Use in Class and Its Implication on Learning. In: Ardito, C., et al. Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2021. INTERACT 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12933. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85616-8_29

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85616-8_29

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