TEXTS OVER TWEETS: Student may be physically present in classroom, but are they mentally absent when they take to their mobile devices? It all depends on the message and the medium. A study of 145 undergraduates published in the journal Communication Education found that "students who abstained from using their mobile devices, or engaged in class relevant texting, earned a 10–17% higher percentage grade on a multiple-choice test, scored 53–70% higher on information recall, and scored 51–58% higher on note-taking, than those groups engaged in Twitter and irrelevant texting."
Twitter proved especially distracting: "when students were frequently sending tweets, even tweets related to lecture content, they ended up taking lower quality notes."
The authors conclude that "frequent messaging unrelated to class content interferes with student learning while in class; however, relevant messaging does not appear to negatively impact student learning."
