This is a summary of an article titled "Logged In and Zoned Out: How Laptop Internet Use Relates to Classroom Learning" published in Psychological Science in 2017; The DOI is 10.1177/0956797616677314 if you want to check out the details.
Abstract:
Laptop computers are widely prevalent in university classrooms. Although laptops are a valuable tool, they offer access to a distracting temptation: the Internet. In the study reported here, we assessed the relationship between classroom performance and actual Internet usage for academic and nonacademic purposes. Students who were enrolled in an introductory psychology course logged into a proxy server that monitored their online activity during class. Past research relied on self-report, but the current methodology objectively measured time, frequency, and browsing history of participants’ Internet usage. In addition, we assessed whether intelligence, motivation, and interest in course material could account for the relationship between Internet use and performance. Our results showed that nonacademic Internet use was common among students who brought laptops to class and was inversely related to class performance. This relationship was upheld after we accounted for motivation, interest, and intelligence. Class- related Internet use was not associated with a benefit to classroom performance.
> ...Students who were enrolled in an introductory psychology course...
Ugh.
Also, from the paper:
> Five hundred seven students enrolled in an introductory psychology class in fall 2014... Each lecture lasted 1 hr and 50 min with a 10-min break in the middle.
Alternative headline: "500 person intro courses with meat-space lecture periods lasting TWO HOURS are stupid, and everything else is water under the bridge"
edit2: Also from the paper:
> Participants who logged in for less than half of the sessions were excluded from analysis
Why?! You don't think that frequency of use could correlate at all with type of use?! It's like they're willfully introducing unnecessary threats to validity...
And it keeps going like that for the entire paper. I smell experiment design hacking.
>And it keeps going like that for the entire paper. I smell experiment design hacking.
This sort of thing is exactly what pops up in my mind as well. I think they just looked at complete set of data, which might have shown that there is low-to-moderate correlation (assuming most people only use laptops when there is a part of course that is completely irrelevant/boring/already known); once they dropped the most significant use-case, all was left is the butt-in-seat users.
Also, I don't know why they never produce figures of a scatter plot for the data they are analyzing. A simple grade vs laptop time (academic, non-academic, total) figure would explain the results so much better than the raw tables. Maybe I'm just used to other kind of articles though.
P.S. There is also a really funny correlation in table 3, showing negative grade influence from playing games, where table 1 has 0 minutes spent for that across the board.
I believe that we may know a lot about how students at top western universities that take introductory psychology courses think and behave. As for the rest of us, who knows.
Abstract: Laptop computers are widely prevalent in university classrooms. Although laptops are a valuable tool, they offer access to a distracting temptation: the Internet. In the study reported here, we assessed the relationship between classroom performance and actual Internet usage for academic and nonacademic purposes. Students who were enrolled in an introductory psychology course logged into a proxy server that monitored their online activity during class. Past research relied on self-report, but the current methodology objectively measured time, frequency, and browsing history of participants’ Internet usage. In addition, we assessed whether intelligence, motivation, and interest in course material could account for the relationship between Internet use and performance. Our results showed that nonacademic Internet use was common among students who brought laptops to class and was inversely related to class performance. This relationship was upheld after we accounted for motivation, interest, and intelligence. Class- related Internet use was not associated with a benefit to classroom performance.