The Multitasking Myth

I am not generally fond of using "myth" in the sense of "lie" or "untruth widely accepted as truth." (I much prefer the notion of myth as cultural storytelling and as a means of preserving cultural identity.) But since this particularly negative sense of the word is being applied to a phenomenon I find extremely deleterious to learning, I'm ready to go along on this one.

So here's the big question. Is it possible for people in general (and young people in particular) to engage in two or more activities at the same time and do any of them well enough to accomplish the purposes attached to each?

The answer seems to be, according to a resounding majority of researchers, "no."

My General Studies colleagues and I have been saved from some measure of dispute by the fact that our department has banned the use of extraneous technologies in the classroom: no laptops, no iPods, no mobile phones, no recording devices--at least without documents supporting ADA accommodation.

Students occasionally try to circumvent the policy by texting under the desk, but their demeanor is so obvious that I usually catch them and suggest strongly that they put the damned phone away and pay attention. As you can imagine, I'm very well loved for this. But it does make me wonder about students' priorities when they can't shut the "communication" devices off for an hour and a half.

I recently came across Rebecca Clay's article for the APA's online journal, Monitor on Psychology, "Mini-multitaskers." Her thesis is pointed, and reveals the fallacy inherent in the notion that young folk can work effectively on several assignments or tasks at a time.

Multitasking may seem modern and efficient, but research suggests that it slows children's productivity, changes the way they learn and may even render social relationships more superficial.

She provides evidence from recent studies that multitaskers do not save time, but actually take longer to accomplish individual efforts because they're not really doing them simultaneously; they're switching back and forth, and the switching adds time to the job rather than reducing it. And the more complex the job, the more time is lost.

As for my favorite in-class bit of naughty behavior, Clay notes that

Text messaging during class isn't just a high-tech version of passing notes. Because of its demands on attention, multitasking also may impair young people's ability to learn.

This is because, as research out of UCLA indicates, information is processed differently and less effectively when multitasking than it is when one devotes one's full attention to an activity. This may, in turn, exacerbate the problem already bequeathed us by the current emphasis in elementary and high school on rote learning. Dividing attention seems to make it harder for students to truly understand what is being taught; instead, they're more likely to respond by rote, able only to barf back what they've been told without digesting it. Sorry for the ugly analogy, but it's apt.

So, if we combine the short attention spans instilled in our kids by Sesame Street (90 seconds) and television commercials (30 seconds), with the superficiality of rote learning and a constant barrage of digital media (cell phones, iPods, Twitter, Facebook), why doesn't every student have ADHD?

According to Tamara Waters-Wheeler, a North Dakota school psychologist quoted in the article, attention problems are increasing and even if students aren't diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, they're nonetheless exhibiting symptoms because they've grown up multitasking.

The evidence also suggests that the communities established by text-messaging and social networking may be much more superficial than face-to-face friendship. This is particularly important because as media-mediated friendships increase, the quality of these relationships will change the way we look at community, friendship, and other human interactions. The implications for cultural change are manifold. Clay quotes a developmental psychologist, Patricia Greenfield, who finds this multitasking version of friendship troubling:

We evolved as human beings for face-to-face interaction. As more and more interaction becomes virtual, we could lose qualities like empathy that are probably stimulated by face-to-face interaction.

Clay's is only one of myriad articles and blogs devoted to the emerging problems associated with short attention spans and media addiction. One of the best is from Blogger in Middle Earth, Ken Allen, a New Zealand educator whose post on "Binge Thinking" gets at the meat of the matter, which he describes as "cognitive overload."

In order to deal with this phenomenon, it's probably time to start rethinking how we present material to our students. Even in a fast-paced program like ours (cramming a semester's worth of information and learning into eleven weeks), and even in the face of ever more intense scrutiny by the assessment regime, we've simply got to figure out how to slow things down enough to help students change habits that they've acquired over the last twenty years.

Some of what I've read has inspired me to reduce the amount of information and increase the depth to which we explore it each quarter. This is a tough slog for fact- and information-based courses like art history, but in order to address problems associated with superficial learning (and its potential effect on creativity, which I'll address in a later post), some sort of new approach seems necessary. My students are already hinting at a solution: more workshops. My course-evaluation comments are rife with requests for more hands-on activities to connect theory and practice.

I can assure you, however, that I will address the issues one at a time, and use one medium at a time in order to develop some useful strategies. No multitasking will be employed in pursuit of solutions.

As they say in the funnies, "Stay 'tooned."

Image credit: Printed books will always be my medium of choice, but the updated British Museum Reading Room combines the old and the new so beautifully that I thought I'd encourage readers to check it out. The full resolution photo is available here. It was taken in February, 2006, by Diliff and uploaded in its present form to Wikimedia Commons in November 2008. When I mentioned the British Library last week, and wondered what the new library looked like, I hadn't realized that the old reading room still existed at its original site. Because of its marriage of printed codex and digital technology, this seemed like an appropriate illustration for this post. No short attention spans allowed in this place!