August 21, 2018 - This is the 8th of the 9 main pages devoted to PCH 201 Wellness. Here you will find resources to make the most of your academic career, from study skills to dealing with distraction.
Today we have so much more to distract us from what we need to do, so I have provided extensive research evidence to show how the popular use of electronic devices is not good and negatively impacts on not only a student's ability to study, but a student's GPA as well. You will have a chance to work on this in class!
Are you trying to be difficult? "When students have to really think and evaluate what they have to do, this desirable difficulty contributes to meaningful learning,"
Graphic source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/science/Pressure-to-be-online-24x7-taking-toll-on-the-young/articleshow/48950636.cms ('Pressure to be online 24x7 taking toll on the young')
"The more time the participants reported on using e-devices per day -- for instance, reading texts on their iPhone, watching TV, playing internet games, texting, or reading an eBook -- the less well they did when they tried to understand scientific texts."
The way people read on electronic devices may encourage them to pick up only bits and pieces of information from the material, while the comprehension of scientific information requires a more holistic approach to reading where the reader incorporates the information in a relational and structured way.
(Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171206141640.htm)
The top 10 skills that students need to succeed based on the authors' surveys of more than 8,000 teachers include:
"Even the smartest college students suffer academically when they use the Internet in class for non-academic purposes, finds new research by Michigan State University scholars.
"Students of all intellectual abilities should be responsible for not letting themselves be distracted by use of the Internet,"
"All students, regardless of intellectual ability, had lower exam scores the more they used the Internet for non-academic purposes such as reading the news, sending emails and posting Facebook updates."
"University of Sussex researchers said: �Simultaneously using mobile phones, laptops and other media devices could be changing the structure of our brains.
The finding follows research which has linked multi-tasking with a shortened attention span, depression, anxiety and lower grades at school.
Media multi-tasking is becoming more prevalent in our lives today and there is increasing concern about its impacts on our cognition and social-emotional well-being
Multi-tasking with gadgets may shorten attention span, making it harder to focus and form memories, the researchers said, adding that youngsters may be particularly affected by stress.
"Of the top activities, respondents overall reported spending the most time texting (an average of 94.6 minutes a day), followed by sending emails (48.5 minutes), checking Facebook (38.6 minutes), surfing the Internet (34.4 minutes) and listening to their iPods. (26.9 minutes). (First 3 = 121.5 minutes, or 2 hours!)
Women spend more time on their cellphones. While that finding runs somewhat contrary to the traditional view that men are more invested in technology, "women may be more inclined to use cellphones for social reasons such as texting or emails to build relationships and have deeper conversations."
The men in the study, while more occupied with using their cellphones for utilitarian or entertainment purposes, "are not immune to the allure of social media," Roberts said. They spent time visiting such social networking sites as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Among reasons they used Twitter were to follow sports figures, catch up on the news � "or, as one male student explained it, 'waste time,' " Roberts said."
"Students reported frequently searching for content not related to courses, using Facebook, emailing, talking on their cell phones, and texting while doing schoolwork. Hierarchical (blocked) linear regression analyses revealed that using Facebook and texting while doing schoolwork were
negatively associated with overall college GPA."
Computers and Education: The relationship between multitasking and academic performance http://blog.reyjunco.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/JuncoCottenMultitaskingFBTextCAE2012.pdf
"Early results show what most of us know implicitly: if you do two things at once, both efforts suffer.
In fact, multitasking is a misnomer. In most situations, the person juggling e-mail, text messaging, Facebook and a meeting is really doing something called �rapid toggling between tasks,� and is engaged in constant context switching.
The distraction of an interruption, combined with the brain drain of preparing for that interruption, made our test takers 20 percent dumber. That�s enough to turn a B-minus student (80 percent) into a failure (62 percent).
it takes an average of 25 minutes to return to the original task after an interruption."
MEDIAN ANNUAL EARNINGS (IN CONSTANT 2012 DOLLARS)
FOR YOUNG ADULTS AGES 20�24 NOT ENROLLED IN SCHOOL BY EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT, 1980�2012 Graphic source: http://childstats.gov/americaschildren/econ_fig.asp#yaecon1a
"To battle bad behaviors then, one answer is to disrupt the environment in some way. Even small changes can help � like eating the ice cream with your nondominant hand. What this does is disrupt the learned body sequence that's driving the behavior, which allows your conscious mind to come back online and reassert control." What Heroin Addiction Tells Us About Changing Bad Habits "Give a girl an education, and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without further expense to anybody." (Jane Austen; The Free Dictionary)
"All successful studiers write study notes. Writing stuff down is an extremely effective way of retaining information. This is because you have to think about what you�re writing, you have to actually write it down, and you also see what you�ve written." How to Write Kick-Ass Study Notes "Despite a plethora of digital gadgets -- laptops, smartphones, phablets and tablets -- pen and paper remains popular among note takers. Why? Probably because a digital equivalent hasn't been invented yet to satisfactorily mirror the experience of scribbling notes on paper."
Scribbling bests typing for knowledge retention
Keyboards may allow you to capture data fast, but if you want to remember what you've captured, you should resort to good, old-fashioned scribbling.
A recent study by Pam Mueller, a graduate student at Princeton University, and Daniel Oppenheimer, an associate professor of cognitive psychology at UCLA, found that students who used laptops to type their notes didn't retain information as well as those who took handwritten notes.
The study found that "participants using laptops were more inclined to take verbatim notes than participants who wrote longhand, thus hurting learning," the researchers write in their report.
Since the laptop users took more complete notes, it seemed reasonable to assume they would have an advantage when the time came to review their notes for exams, but that turned out not to be the case.
"[W]e found the opposite," the report continues. "Even when allowed to review notes after a week's delay, participants who had taken notes with laptops performed worse on tests of both factual content and conceptual understanding, relative to participants who had taken notes longhand."
How the mind works when notes are written by hand may go some way toward explaining these results. "If you're doing something letter by letter, that's a lower level of processing than engaging with the content well enough to paraphrase it," Mueller says.
"If you're hearing the words and just putting them down on paper, you're not processing at a deep level," she adds."
"Once thrown off track, it can take some 23 minutes for a worker to return to the original task,"
Citation: Workplace Distractions: Here's Why You Won't Finish This Article http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324339204578173252223022388?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424127887324339204578173252223022388.html
"...executive functions � the ability to avoid distractions, focus attention, hold relevant information in working memory, and regulate impulsive behavior...."
Citation: Focusing on executive functions in kindergarten leads to lasting academic improvements (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141112144722.htm)
"The researchers found significantly lower quality in essays completed by the participants who were interrupted during the outline and writing phases than in essays of those who were not interrupted. In addition, those participants who were interrupted during the writing phase wrote considerably fewer words.
"Interruption can cause a noticeable decrement in the quality of work, so it's important to take steps to reduce the number of external interruptions we encounter daily," said Foroughi. "For example, turn off your cell phone and disable notifications such as e-mail while trying to complete an important task."
"Self-regulation skills -- the skills that help children pay attention, follow directions, stay on task and persist through difficulty -- are critical to a child's success in kindergarten and beyond."
"The researchers found that performance on the assessment suffered if the student received any kind of audible notification. That is, every kind of phone distraction was equally destructive to their performance: An irruptive ping distracted people just as much as a shrill, sustained ring tone. It didn�t matter, too, if a student ignored the text or didn�t answer the phone: As long as they got a notification, and knew they got it, their test performance suffered."
What Bill Gates shared with graduating high school students:
Rule 1 : Life is not fair - get used to it!
Rule 2 : The world doesn't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3 : You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4 : If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
Rule 5 : Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: They called it opportunity.
Rule 6 : If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
Rule 7 : Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were: So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8 : Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. *This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
Rule 9 : Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. *Do that on your own time.
Rule 10 : Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11 : Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.
Note: At a September, 1999 AMWA meeting, Anna Getselman, reference librarian at Harvard's Countway Library of Medicine emphasized that information on the Internet is copyright-protected, even if no copyright notice is provided. Transmitting, downloading, and surfing are considered copying.
To be on the safe side -
CITE EVERYTHING, Give credit where credit is due!
PS to Note: I have researched the copyright side of the Internet. Check my Copyright Statement Web page for more specifics about this issue.
While you are in college, keep these ideas in mind...
From "Why Colleges Are Starting to Worry About Student-Loan Defaults"
"According to a 2011 Harvard University study, the No. 1 reason approximately 50% of all college students fail to complete their studies is financial. And a 2013 Bentley University white paper notes that ��35% of business leaders give recent college graduates they have hired a �C� or lower in being prepared for the job,� while ��66% of recent college graduates say unpreparedness is a real problem among their own cohort.�
Citation source: Why Colleges Are Starting to Worry About Student-Loan Defaults (http://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-colleges-starting-worry-student-130004040.html)
