Five Teaching and Learning Myths—Debunked

A Guide for Teachers

Adam M. Brown, Althea Need Kaminske

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351368148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Drawing from research in developmental and educational psychology, cognitive science, and the learning sciences, Five Teaching and Learning Myths—Debunked addresses some of the most commonly misunderstood educational and cognitive concerns in teaching and learning. Multitasking, problem-solving, attention, testing, and learning styles are all integral to student achievement but, in practice, are often muddled by pervasive myths. In a straightforward, easily digestible format, this book unpacks the evidence for or against each myth, explains the issues concisely and with credible evidence, and provides busy K-12 teachers with actionable strategies for their classrooms and lesson plans.

1
Multitasking

Originally the term multitasking was a computer term referring to a computer’s ability to run multiple programs or tasks simultaneously. Gradually this term came to be used to refer to some people’s ability, or skill, to get many things done seemingly simultaneously. In today’s world we refer to multitasking as a much desired skill, suggesting that some people possess this skill and others do not. How wonderful to be able to work on several projects at once, read several documents at a time, do homework while watching television, take notes on your laptop while jumping back and forth to Facebook, and all the while getting notifications from your phone about incoming texts, tweets, Instagrams, and calls.

Research reveals that multitasking negatively affects memory. This is true even if the tasks are simple. Contrary to what you might think, digital natives (students who grew up in the digital age and who are used to frequent digital media) perform no better at instructional multitasking than do those who are naïve to the digital world (1). Another important point to consider is that habitual media multitasking increases “mind wandering,” decreasing attention to relevant tasks. Students who multitask make significantly more errors because the brain has difficulty trying to attend to both tasks simultaneously (or rapidly switch from one to the other).

The Myths

1. Multitasking allows your brain to work on several projects at once.
2. Multitasking is a useful skill that allows people to accomplish several tasks simultaneously in an efficient way, saving time and increasing productivity.
3. Multitasking helps you deal with distractions and prevents procrastination.
4. Through practice, children, adolescents, and adults get better at multitasking.

The Research

Research on multitasking from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and educational psychology reveals that multitasking is actually attention switching. In other words, when we are engaged in what we feel is multitasking, we are really just rapidly switching our focus from one task to another. Rapid attention switching results in poor attention and poor cognitive performance, while simultaneously reinforcing the task switcher for task switching (2). Furthermore, even though an experienced task switcher may be well practiced at task switching, their cognitive performance remains low (3). Switching attentional focus takes time and wastes resources. Not only does switching attention increase total amount of time on task, but each time we switch our focus, our brain engages in a multiple step process. Each time you switch between tasks your brain has to:

1. Stop the current task.
2. Search for information about the new task.
3. Find new task parameters.
4. Engage in the new task.

These steps take time and attention, even if it feels like it happens automatically. This is where we waste time, make more mistakes, and impair our deep thinking. Worse than that, repeatedly engaging in attention switching harms our ability to stay on topic by ignoring distractions. Rather than maintaining focus, our brains expect, and seek distractions because they have been trained to switch (see Chapter 3: Focus). When we avoid deep thinking by task switching our memory and learning are harmed (4).

To make matters worse, lots of multitasking requires decision-making. Decision-making is also very hard on your neural resources and … little decisions appear to take up as much energy as big ones. One of the first things we lose is impulse control. This rapidly spirals into a depleted state in which, after making lots of insignificant decisions, we can end up making truly bad decisions about something important. Why would anyone want to add to their daily weight of information processing by trying to multitask?

(Levitin, 2014, p. 98, emphasis added (5))

1. Myth: Multitasking allows your brain to work on several projects at once

RESEARCH: Rather than working on several tasks simultaneously, our brains have limited attentional resources (we have trouble thinking about more than one task at a time).

Perhaps the biggest myth about multitasking is that it allows us to work on several tasks at the same time, when in fact we are switching rapidly between many tasks. Multitasking always comes with an attentional switch cost. For example, in an article from Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, researchers asked participants to decide whether sentences were plausible or not (e.g. “This morning I ate a bowl of cereal” vs. “This morning I ate a bowl of shoes”) in a variety of attention conditions. Participants did best in single tasking conditions, conditions where participants were performing only one task. Participants also did well in the selective attention conditions, i.e. where they had both visual and auditory distractors but were told to ignore these distracting stimuli. Participants in the multitasking condition did the worst and made significantly more errors than participants in the other conditions (6).

Importantly, there are two stages that reliably contribute to the attentional switch cost of attempting to multitask: task-preparation and selective attention (7). Specifically, when students are given time to prepare, the cost of task switching goes down and when students’ ability to focus and ignore irrelevant information is better, the cost of task switching goes down. The longer students are given between tasks the less of a performance cost. With a longer time between one task and the next task, student performance increases and task switch costs decrease. However, it is important to understand that task-preparation helps any task, not just when switching tasks.

Monsell (8) reports, in an article on task switching found in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, that individual responses are significantly slower and tend to have more errors directly after a task switching. The author’s review article investigated the fine tuning of task switching and found that a task switch can cause problems for a number of reasons. First, there is a switch cost in time between different tasks to get readjusted to the new task. And second, a preparation effect. The preparation effect can be reduced if you know a task is coming. According to Levitin (5) “Because attention switching is metabolically costly, it’s good neural hygiene for your brain to give it time to switch into the mindset of your next task gradually and in a relaxed way before the next task is begun” (p. 320).

When people engage in task switching it not only hurts their attention and performance on the task, it also hurts their memory. For example, research recently published in the journal Memory reported on a study that investigated the impact of memory for faces. Wammes and Fernandes (9) found that “the largest declines in memory performance occurred when the concurrent tasks (multitasking) required the same processing resources, and also used the same material set as that in the target recognition task” (p. 198). They demonstrated that when participants were multitasking there was a 42 percent decline in recognition memory for faces. This outcome is explained by a competition between task-relevant and task-irrelevant information. It was also found that multitasking negatively affected both short-term and long-term memory. Bottom line, it was more difficult for participants to remember if they had seen a face if they had been multitasking at the time they saw the face.

Multitasking hurts both memory for facts and memory for how-to-do something. Research published in 2016 in the journal Memory & Cognition investigated declarative (facts) and procedural (how-to) memory through the introduction and use of novel tools. Memory for what the tools looked like and what they could do was lower for those who were multitasking in comparison with the performance of those who were single tasking. This tells us that declarative memory, or memory for facts, is harmed during multitasking. Further, when multitasking, procedural (how-to-do) memory is also harmed. People showed low levels of accuracy both for how to use the tools and for demonstrating how to hold the tools in the multitasking condition (10).

The availability of media in our everyday lives makes it easier to multitask than ever. Media multitasking is using multiple forms of media simultaneously while performing several tasks. An example would be a student studying, with FaceBook open, a favorite TV show playing, and the phone chirping away as texts, tweets, and other notifications come in. Media multitasking negatively affects student performance (11). When students use multimedia during a lecture their learning is impaired compared to students who take notes with traditional pencil and paper. According to Wood, Zivcakova, Gentile, Archer, De Pasquale, and Noska (11) “contrary to popular beliefs, attempting to attend to lectures and engage digital technologies for off task activities can have a detrimental impact on learning” (p. 365). Not only does media multitasking hurt memory and learning, the more we engage in media multitasking, the more it hurts us. People who tend to multitask with many forms of media have poorer memory for information they had seen in the past (12). Researchers found that those people who use more media multitasking have a “wider attentional scope” which means they pay attention to more task-irrelevant information, hurting their ability to pay attention to task-relevant information because there is a competition for space.

Media multitasking becomes more harmful the more we engage in it because it essentially teaches us to become distracted more easily (3). Loh, Tan, and Lim (4) investigated distractibility of media multitasking using several different groups: 1) an undistracted (single-tasking) group, 2) a distracted group, and last, 3) a multitasking group. The undistracted group test scores averaged around 93 percent correct. In the distracted group average scores dipped a bit, hovering about 89 percent correct. Most important is that the scores of the multitasking group who were listening and reading (similar to being in a typical class where a Power Point presentation is being given) were significantly lower, averaging about 74 percent correct. What’s just as interesting is participants who reported that they spent much of their day-to-day life multitasking scored worst and reported that they had to exert more effort to complete the task. The researchers reported that “extensive daily media multitasking directly reinforces task switching behavior and deteriorates the ability to sustain attention on a focal task” (p. 120). Essentially what this research reveals is that 1) reducing multitasking reduces distractibility, increasing test scores and 2) habitual media multitasking increases “mind wandering,” decreasing attention to relevant tasks.

Connections

In an interesting 2016 study titled “Attention and the testing effect,” researchers found that retrieval practice was more effective in the multitasking condition (13). What this means is that one of the few interventions that does impact and help decrease the negative effects of multitasking is quizzing. See Chapter 4 on Testing for more on retrieval practice.

2. Myth: Multitasking is a useful skill that allows people to accomplish several tasks simultaneously in an efficient way, saving ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Meet the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Multitasking
• 2 Examples
• 3 Focus
• 4 Testing
• 5 Learning Styles
• Afterword: Technology in the Classroom
• Glossary