Multitasking with a mobile phone negatively affects students’ lecture recall, reading comprehension, and reading speed, finds an analysis presented last week at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.
The worst effects are from using social-media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, according to the paper by doctoral student Quan Chen and associate professor Zheng Yan of the University at Albany, State University of New York.
They used statistical methods to aggregate results of 29 prior studies on the topic, published between 2003 and 2016. The studies included more than 1,900 participants (often in college).
