Instant Messaging Found to Slow Students' Reading

Boston

Students who send and receive instant messages while completing a reading assignment take longer to get through their texts but apparently still manage to understand what they’re reading, according to one of the first studies to explore how the practice affects academic learning.

“Students who are managing busy lives may think they are accomplishing more by multitasking, but they will actually need more time to achieve the same level of performance on an academic task,” said Laura L. Bowman, a psychology professor at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain.

Ms. Bowman and her colleagues based their conclusions on a study of 59 college students who were tracked in a university laboratory while they read a selection from a college psychology textbook on a computer screen and received instant messages. The researchers presented their findings today during the annual meeting here of the American Psychological Association , a Washington-based group representing...