'All Over the Place': A Case Study of Classroom Multitasking and Attentional Performance

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“All over the place”: A case study of classroom multitasking and attentional performance

Dan HassounIndiana University, USA

AbstractMedia multitasking has become a contested practice in many college classrooms. Students increasingly split their attentions between lecture and personal media, while educators largely view the new screens as fostering disengaged and distracted forms of conduct. Together, teachers and students have developed a series of strategies governing the proper practice of multitasking during lecture. Using interviews and ethnographic field observations, I examine how these strategies of media use operate within one undergraduate classroom. Drawing from this case study, I argue that multitasking reveals a complex series of negotiations between teachers, students, and their co-present environment. Examining these negotiations provides not only a snapshot of how media attention is practiced within the classroom but also suggests ways for instructors to respond to the rise of new technologies within their own classes.

KeywordsAttention, classroom, co-presence, education, ethnography, mobile phones, multitasking, new media, performance, privacy

Introduction

If one had to select one representative media-based educational concern for the present age, multitasking would be a serious contender. The proliferation of mobile technologies and anytime, anywhere Internet have allowed media to flood into college classrooms, frequently reconfiguring the social dynamics of those spaces in the process (Ling, 2004).

Corresponding author:Dan Hassoun, Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University, 800 E 3rd St., Bloomington, IN 47405, USA. Email: [email protected]

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Associations between media and lecture hall distraction date at least as far back as the 1990s, when Conrad Kottak (2000) argued that television conditioned students to “treat instructors like TV sets” to tune out when not sufficiently entertaining (p. 92). The rise of handheld electronics, however, is refocusing older anxieties about the fortitude of student attention into concerns about personal media conduct. If instructors favor “serial tasking, doing one thing at a time,” the millennial learner is said to prefer “multitasking and individualized and interactive learning.” If teachers want “abstract” thinking, digital students opt instead for a “shallow ocean of information” (Levine and Dean, 2012: 50).

With this, “multitasking” has crystallized into a describable and problematized form of behavior linked to the distracting combination of media tasks with lecture-listening (see Hassoun, 2012, for an etymology of the term).1 Today’s lecture halls are ripe with explicit and implicit rules governing when and how certain devices should be used. As such, personal media have come to occupy an important place in realignments of how instructors and students perform their respective roles during class.

The larger implications of this development have been less explored by humanities scholars, despite a deluge of recent research in the social and cognitive sciences. However, the pedagogical consequences of multitasking are significant to our roles as teachers (no doubt, many readers can recollect times where they disciplined forms of student media in their own classrooms). In order to explore this performative aspect of new media, this article uses interviews and ethnographic field observations to paint what Clifford Geertz (1973) famously called a “thick description” of how multitasking oper-ated within one undergraduate classroom. Specifically, my observations suggest that multitasking has become a deeply “ordinary” practice, one whose norms of conduct reveal not passive modes of distraction, but rather a rich series of negotiations with one’s co-present environment. Examining these negotiations not only provides a glimpse into the performative norms of the classroom but also suggests ways that educators can respond to the distractions facilitated by new media.

Multitasking’s discursive contexts

Multitasking has become a buzzword for evaluating the success of current educational models.2 Depending on the commentator, new media facilitate either the destruction of student learning or its timely retooling. Many educators and researchers claim that rather than sustaining concentrations toward the front of the room, new technologies entice students to toggle their focus between course content and personal web browsing and text chatting. The result has been the production of a generation of learners overly reliant on instant gratification (Carr, 2010) and disturbingly inefficient at processing informa-tion about their world (Bowman et al., 2010; Lee et al., 2012; Levine et al., 2007; Wei et al., 2012). New media critics like Sherry Turkle (2011) and Malcolm McCullough (2013) contend that personal screens impede users’ sense of immediate co-presence, damaging the perception of shared space so crucial for classroom learning environments. Work in cognitive psychology has even gone so far as concluding that “true” multitask-ing is a myth. Due to limitations on mental processing power, many scientists argue that multitasking is no more than inefficient switching between parallel tasks (Marois and Ivanoff, 2005; Ophir et al., 2009).



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Notwithstanding multitasking’s scientific meanings, some writers argue for its cen-trality as a tool for mastering new information environments. Jenkins et al. (2009) actu-ally cite multitasking as a key media literacy skill, defining it as the ability for students to “know when and how to pay close attention” to particular elements of their surround-ings (p. 64). Balsamo (2011: 155) goes further, asserting that innovative classrooms might attempt to replicate students’ everyday experiences of continuous partial attention in order to prepare them for work in the new economy. With the increasing synergies between academic and corporate training, some commentators have circled multitasking as an important part of one’s professional development in college (Brown, 2002; Eisenwine and Hadley, 2010). This rationality, criticized heavily by progressive writers, links multitasking to neoliberal values of self-maximization and entrepreneurialism (see Bragg, 2007; Giroux, 2011). Here, new devices become liabilities for students to indi-vidually control or stow away in the interest of “getting the most” from their education. Rather than abiding by the traditional rules of educational space, students instead view class as a customizable time to juggle “academic and social priorities” at whim (Watulak, 2010: 202).

For teachers feeling (at best) dubious about the professionalization or customization of higher education, multitasking presents a tremendous challenge. Instructors frequently feel caught between two unsatisfactory choices. On the one hand, they can permit certain media, but at the risk of fostering distracted and disengaged atmospheres at odds with liberal educational goals. On the other hand, they can restrict certain forms of media, as has become commonplace in many classes (Young, 2006). However, such regulatory efforts are frequently unsuccessful, with many students sidestepping policies through strategies of concealment: surreptitiously sending texts beneath desks, minimizing web browsers when teachers are within eyeshot, and so on (Watkins, 2009: 177–178). Students regularly attest that it is easy to text in class without the teacher’s detection (Tindell and Bohlander, 2012: 4). Ultimately, the classroom becomes a space where edu-cators concede it is “impossible to know” what students are actually doing (Watkins, 2009: 184).

Regardless of the teacher’s formal policies on multitasking, larger cultural discourses have successfully attached negative connotations to the practice. Many students have internalized some negative self-concept about their own media juggling (Baker et al., 2012: 284). Williams et al. (2011) found that even though a majority of respondents admitted to texting in class, 73% still described it as “unprofessional” (p. 52). In another study, Wurst et al. (2008) observed similar levels of self-awareness among college stu-dents about their inefficient media usage, with respondents ambivalently regarding their devices as “distracting” (p. 1773).

As this widespread ambivalence suggests, analyzing multitasking is more than simply a quantitative question of measuring attentional states. Such has been the dominant means of analyzing multitasking within the social sciences, where researchers typically seek to objectify its effects on task performance and data retention. In nearly all studies, the “multitasker” (as a defined subject position) occupies a space outside the researcher to be concretely documented. In using these methods, many studies contribute to multi-tasking’s broader problematization without necessarily considering its more experiential and social aspects. A humanistic inquiry into media distraction requires explication of its



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ordinary modes of self-making and complex textures of anxiety, pleasure, impulsivity, and banality. As Kathleen Stewart (2007) notes,

The ordinary throws itself together out of forms, flows, powers, pleasures, encounters, distractions, drudgery, denials, practical solutions, shape-shifting forms of violence, daydreams, and opportunities lost or found. Or it falters, fails. But either way we feel its pull. (p. 29)

By attuning itself to the affective currents of media use, scholarly research can expand from asking whether or in what ways multitasking is a problem, to exploring how its designation as a problem has shaped its performance among students and teachers. Doing so may entail leaving the laboratory or library and paying attention to the lived-in, co-present spaces where media use actually occurs.

Method and site

In fall 2012, I enrolled as an auditing (i.e. ungraded) student in a large undergraduate course at a big US midwestern state university to gather observations on other students’ media use. In order to not unduly disrupt class flow, I decided to act as a covert partici-pant: neither the instructor nor students were initially informed about the study, while my relatively young appearance allowed me to blend into the classroom in ways an older researcher might not have.3 The course itself was popular within the psychology depart-ment, being one of several required electives needed for completion of the undergraduate degree. Most of the 200 enrolled students were declared psychology majors in their sophomore years or above. While I did not have access to official demographics, I observed a substantial majority of Caucasian students, with a roughly equal distribution in men and women (consistent with the general demographics of the college). The class met for two 75-minute sessions per week, all within a large lecture hall typical for the university.

My decision to observe this particular course was largely based on the class’s fusion of traditional lecture and active learning models, as well as my personal interest in its subject matter. Each day, the instructor delivered most course content through projected PowerPoint slides, pausing intermittently to solicit student questions. These PowerPoint slides were posted weekly to the class website, but with key slides and videos missing, so students were compelled to attend the live class to obtain the full lecture. Each student also received an interactive remote for the term. The instructor would conclude each ses-sion with a projected multiple-choice question pertaining to the day’s lecture, to which students would respond remotely. These responses were aggregated to gauge the class’ general comprehension of the material, as well as to gather attendance records on each student. Crucially, neither the syllabus nor the teacher made any mention of a course-wide policy about personal media conduct.

On each class day, I split my time (and attention) between two notebooks—one con-taining my lecture notes, the other for recording field observations. In order to observe a wide variety of students, I made a habit of sitting across different areas of the room each week, alternating between the front, middle, and back rows. In each location, I attempted to sit closely to as many other students as possible. Once situated, I followed a loose




routine of observation, noting how many students in my periphery were using their devices, in what ways their usages corresponded to the beats of the lecture, and, if pos-sible, what they were using their screens to access (though, as I explain below, I remained sensitive to privacy issues).

If particular students stood out to me over the course of several days, I would assign them names for my field notes and approach them after class requesting an interview. Over the term, I solicited four student interviews and received permission to conduct one, in addition to a separate interview I held with the instructor. Both interviews were done in private offices, where I asked the informant a series of semi-structured questions relating to their thoughts and responses toward multitasking. All interactions were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. In general, I found that informants’ reflections trian-gulated well with my own observations and previously published classroom studies.

This is not to say that I observed impartially. The liberty I had as an auditing student, combined with how my project had primed me to examine media use, undoubtedly biased my observations. Furthermore, my own status as an instructor made me initially less sympathetic to the case for using media during lecture. Prior to this term, I imposed cell phone bans in my own classrooms and had not been timid to call out students mid-lecture for infringements. This mentality carried over into my own performances as a graduate student: although my MacBook accompanied me to many a meeting and semi-nar, I would make a professional effort to keep it closed or open only to relevant materi-als. Hence, my observations about undergraduate multitasking evolved from a schizophrenic position, at once in tune with the pedagogical needs of being an instructor and the emotional–attentional flows of being a student listening to lecture.

Rather than attempt an objective account of the impact or meanings of multitasking, I proceed under Clifford Geertz’s (1973) contention that social inquiry is always a process of detailing “our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to” (p. 9). Classroom multitasking both provokes and exists within a field of annoyances, boredoms, and banalities that run through all participants, be they teachers or students, or researchers or subjects. In this study, I use a reflexive tone to evoke the social scene in which these affects occur, noting how the disciplinary and emotional connotations attached to multitasking guide its everyday conduct. Charting these conditions permits a qualitative examination of multitasking’s social features. Even if my study’s classroom conditions are not universally representative, I believe that social scripts I describe probably strike a chord of familiarity with many teacher and student experiences.

The conduct of media use

The modern lecture hall is a fascinating blend of forced intimacy and guarded privacy. In a class of 200 students, the first thing to do upon entering is to scout out seating. Rule of thumb is to select the areas of the room affording you the most personal space. Plopping down directly next to a stranger is a no–no when there is a set of two or more open seats nearby. Maintaining a distance of at least three seats between you and your nearest peer is optimal, for it allows any latecomers to fill in the chair at the midpoint while still affording all parties one buffer space between themselves and anyone else.



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Despite everyone’s efforts, things become a tad cramped in a class of 200. Likelihood is high that you will be sardined between two strangers. Sitting in such confined quarters—often between students tapping away at their iPhones—I could never fail to notice the sea of screens before me. Most students, if not chatting idly with their neighbors or sitting quietly with their notebooks, were staring at a laptop or phone. In the waiting period between their seating and the beginning of lecture, this was their time, and they seemed content on passing it with visits to Facebook, Tumblr, or their email account.

Class began when the professor prompted the day’s PowerPoint on the overhead screen, took her place at the lectern, and began, “Good morning, class.” At this time, the social dynamic of the room rapidly shifted: idle conversations faded, eyes focused toward the front of the room, and several students (particularly those toward the front) began to stow away their smartphones. For individuals at the back of the room, the activ-ity was more varied. While all of the students quieted down, several remained on their phones, tapping silently, while others darkened their screens and stored them adjacent to their notebooks or on their laps. Those with laptops remained on them, though many visited the class website to download the day’s lecture slides and created fresh Word documents to begin typing notes.

Etiquette

These actions suggest widespread recognition of the etiquette of lecture-listening, as well as the surveillance underpinning those norms. Within the space of the classroom, the professor is to be visually and aurally dominant, directing the class’s collective eyes and ears toward course content. The ideal student attends to this content directly, inter-rupting only if called upon. While codes regarding student engagement are usually more stringent in smaller classes, media users within larger lectures still operate under a cau-tious presumption that their media use may be disruptive to others around them.

I interviewed the instructor of my course (whom I will call Sarah), asking for her thoughts on media etiquette.4 Sarah’s feelings on multitasking ultimately came down to a sense of scale: while inappropriate for smaller and more dialogue-driven seminars, media multitasking was inevitable, if still undesirable, within larger classes:

DH: Over the past few years, have you noticed any changes in the quantity of media that people use in the classrooms and the way that they use them? What are you basically seeing when you’re teaching?

Sarah: I don’t perceive changes in how people attend classes … I do feel like the size of the class is definitely going to increase the sense of ano-nymity for students, so you see more usage of multimedia. And that’s understandable. Not everything that we talk about in class is interest-ing. A little bit of not paying attention to the instructor does not always cost you the entire class.

While she did not prohibit any devices in her class, Sarah found it difficult to com-pletely ignore the sight of inattentive students:




Sarah: … the speaker is almost always aware of it. So even in a class with 200 students, if someone is dozing off, I can clearly see that. They certainly don’t feel that that’s the case. I suppose that once you stand in front of the podium you realize you actually do see everything.

Despite a sense of anonymity, students do know that their media use occurs within a field of potentially disapproving gazes, from both the instructor and their peers. Media multitasking in a large class requires a delicate balance between feelings of facelessness when surrounded by other students, and the awareness of being viewed by those same students.

This ultimately translates into an ethic of conspicuous covertness. Multitasking is the classroom’s elephant in the room: few readily talk about it, even if everybody is aware that it is common. Why else would your neighbors be staring at their MacBook screen for the entire duration of class? At the same time, this sense of obviousness, this know-ing that everybody else knows, still functions disciplinarily, compelling students to keep their media as invisible as possible. Different technologies carry different perils. Laptop use is more defensible, since it is ambiguous from the front whether the user is typing notes or not, but the size of its screen makes web browsing impossible to hide from students in surrounding seats. Cell phone use is easier to conceal, but difficult to justify if caught. Given this taxonomy, it was unsurprising that in this particular course, laptop users coalesced in the back rows while phone users were more dispersed across the room.

One student I observed (whom I shall call Abby) typified back row attention jug-gling. Sitting two chairs apart from me in the second-to-last row, Abby laid her iPhone next to her notebook at the start of class and returned to it regularly throughout the period. When the phone’s screen lit up, indicating a new text alert, Abby would casually lay her pen to the side, pluck the device off her desk, and type a response with both thumbs. Elbows on the desk, her phone held prominently at eye-level, she appeared unconcerned by the visibility of her media use. Other students in the general vicinity behaved in similar manners, picking up their phones or tapping at them on their desks at semi-regular intervals.

Compare this to Wesley, a student I observed in one of the front rows. Within immedi-ate eyeshot of the instructor, Wesley was markedly less conspicuous in his phone use. Not only did he check his screen less frequently, he stored it in his pocket, out of view of his neighbors. When the impulse arose, he cautiously unveiled the device from its lair and, taking care to keep it below eye-level, typed on it with his left thumb while still maintaining the appearance of note-taking with his right hand. Although he was in no danger of retribution, Wesley appeared keenly aware that his actions could bother the teacher or neighboring classmates. In my relocation from the back of the lecture room to the very front, I immediately understood why. To sit close to the front is to place oneself into a perpetual panoptic field, always potentially viewable by the lecturer. I felt this even without a phone or laptop on my person. Sitting mere yards away from the teacher, with full knowledge of her ability to “see everything,” I experienced a creeping sense of guilt for taking field notes rather than paying more attention to her lecture. Eager to



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appear “on task,” I even began scribbling in my notebook at one point to give the impres-sion of being fully attentive.

Classroom geography matters, but certain decorum expectations structure media use no matter where students sit. Despite the liberty that some feel to split their atten-tions away from class, most students take precautions to make their multitasking as quiet and aurally unobtrusive as possible. If the danger in smaller classes is being visu-ally “caught,” the risk in larger lecture halls lies in the phonic blunder: an unexpected blast of sound emanating from your device marking you as an offender. During my days in the back rows, I observed one student, Brandon, perusing the web on his lap-top. Upon accessing one particular website, his computer began to hum a faint back-ground tune, barely detectable, but loud enough for B to jerk forward and quickly punch his mute key. What Brandon struggled to avoid was any overt disruption of the teacher’s voice, any explicit indication that he was using his laptop for anything other than class purposes.

Interruptions by ringing phones or text chimes were not uncommon throughout the semester. Every other day, somebody’s phone would ring, causing the instructor to momentarily hesitate and students to shift uncomfortably in their seats, waiting for the invading tone to cease. I would crane my head around the room to scope out the offend-ing student whose device was blaring and who was usually struggling to silence it. “Don’t they understand the rules?” I would think to myself, half-annoyed, half- empathetic. “Everyone knows to silence all electronics before class starts.” On one occa-sion, the phone ringing did not stop, prompting Sarah to halt her lecture entirely. After a pregnant pause, it became evident that it was not anybody’s cell phone, but rather the classroom’s landline telephone that was inexplicably blaring. Confused, Sarah wandered to the phone, picked it up, and immediately placed it back on the receiver. The class burst into laughter. Tensions now dispelled, Sarah continued her lecture, and the students resumed their properly anonymized attention splitting.

Privacy

The paradox of conspicuous covertness made gathering my observations about multi-tasking more difficult. Although wedged next to numerous media users, I felt uncomfort-able peering over their shoulders to observe what they were doing on their devices. The very thought felt invasive, even though the students’ screens had arguably entered my peripheral vision. In this sense, classroom multitasking straddles a line between personal privacy and public responsibility, between an urge to cry out, “Put your phone away!” and a perception that it is “none of my business.”

With this guardedness in mind, I was cautious about approaching students to be inter-viewed for this study. My first attempt is an illustrative example of the feelings of guilt that have become attached to classroom multitasking. Chelsea and Donna were two stu-dents I observed using iPhones throughout two consecutive days. Intrigued, I approached them after class one day to schedule an interview. It was not the simplest task to pull off tactfully. Within the context of a large class, I was a complete stranger to them, and my interview request would reveal that I had been spying on their media use. Our differences in gender further complicated the ethics of casually asking for their time. Feeling




supremely creepy, I approached them after class one day and introduced myself as a graduate student researching technology use in classrooms. Although visibly surprised, the two students listened intently. All smooth so far.

I continued, “I couldn’t help but notice that you were using your phones throughout class today. I’m not judging you, and I’m not some ‘plant’ for the professor or anything like that. Your media use just really interests me.” At my mention of multitasking, their eyes quickly dropped away. Giggling uncomfortably, the two shot incredulous glances at one another, as if to ask, “Who is this guy?” It became clear that I slightly overstepped my boundaries, like asking a complete stranger to be interviewed for a misdemeanor they had committed. Multitasking was clearly a private activity, not so egregious that one could not acknowledge it at all, but just taboo enough that openly discussing it felt uncomfortable. Chelsea and Donna politely agreed to the interview, but it was implicitly clear that they were not interested (they withdrew their willingness when I followed up by email).

After two similarly unsuccessful attempts, I finally managed to secure an interview with Brandon, one of the laptop users I had observed earlier. Like Chelsea and Donna, Brandon seemed slightly off-put upon hearing my proposal, but he agreed to the inter-view after deliberating for a few moments. He recalled later that the idea seemed “weird,” but his curiosity about the project led him to accept. During the interview, I asked him about his thoughts on media use and privacy:

DH: Do you feel like it’s the student’s right [to use media in class]?Brandon: [quizzically] Um, their right to look at it? Yes … I mean, yeah, they

can do whatever they want, as long as they’re not playing music or something obnoxious. But I think there’s that little bit of etiquette where most people have common sense where if they’re going to be all over the place, that they sit in the back. Because you can see every-thing, you know, if someone sits in the front.

Brandon held that students were free to use their devices as they wished, so long as their activities did not publically interfere with anyone else’s field of vision. Shortly after, I asked him whether he ever felt that others were watching his media use:

DH: Do you ever get the sense—and I guess this might also depend on the class size, of course—but do you ever get the sense that the instructor is watching you or that the TAs are watching you, or that other students around you are into what you’re doing?

Brandon: Every once in a while I’m sure someone will glance at my screen, but, I mean, that’s just them. It’s certainly the environment, but I don’t think it’s bad … if they like to look away. [nervous laugh] I mean, it’s just, I don’t care. It’s just my computer screen.

DH: Does this impact where you would sit in the classroom? So like the middle versus the front versus …?

Brandon: Like I said, as long as I don’t have rows of people behind me, I don’t really matter. I don’t really mind.



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Although he treated multitasking protocol as commonsensical, Brandon had a diffi-cult time reconciling his own laptop use—which he regarded as private—with the larger customs of the classroom. Although aware enough of his surroundings to only use his laptop in the back rows, he regarded the possibility of other eyes falling on his device with some flippancy. If they were observing his screen, it was because they made the choice to look at it.

Certainly, the ability to look can be enticing. In spite of, or perhaps because of, my uneasiness observing the screens in my periphery, covert media use acquired an undeni-ably alluring aura. To look was to catch a fleeting glimpse of a private realm, a land of text alerts and Facebook newsfeeds far beyond the classroom. Looking is the result not just of proximity, but also of impulsivity. “How do I not invade their privacy?” I scrawled in my field notes one day while wedged between two students on their iPhones. “It’s so easy to glance. And if I do, is it my fault, or theirs? Would they even care that much?” The injection of personal electronics into the classroom has resulted in a field of publi-cized privacies, where the user (sort of) prefers that nobody else look, and the observer is unsure of whether to look or not.

Boredom

It is nearly impossible to observe any large lecture hall without detecting at least some ennui in the air. When critics mourn students’ diminished attention spans, they some-times forget that being an undergraduate can be a, frankly, boring experience. Not every class equally enraptures every student, and not every student takes particular courses for the same reasons. Given the discrepancy between class goals and the interests of each student, some degree of disinterest is inevitable for even the most apt of pupils. Banal as this observation may seem, it is crucial for understanding how media have integrated themselves within the attentional flow of the lecture. With its way of rerouting one’s concentration away from “proper” materials at hand, media multitasking may have some kinship with the napping or doodling classically associated with disinterested students.

The difficulty in describing this disinterest is that it rests on that most fickle of human capacities: the attention span. Even under the noblest of intentions, concentrations can wander, slip away to other topics, or fade in and out at a moment’s notice. Attention is a capricious, felt experience impossible to completely transcribe to words. It was not uncommon for my own attention to ebb and flow while attending lecture, even during days when I was quite interested in the subject matter. When really struggling to concen-trate on the course, I may have opened a new web browser tab to check my email had I less self-consciousness and my laptop handy.

My situation is unique in that I was auditing a course for no credit. Most other stu-dents, relying on the course for graduation, could not afford to trail off so freely. In my interview, Sarah (the instructor) confirmed that though many enrolled students take “genuine” interest in the course, most others were there primarily for required credit:

Sarah: When you have smaller classes, then you get people who are really motivated in taking that class, whereas when you have 200 people then there will be some percentage of them who are here because they have to be.




The latter scenario seemed to apply for Brandon, who enrolled in the class believing it would easily satisfy a major requirement. Although he claimed to enjoy the class over-all, the subject matter was not particularly interesting to him, and he employed his laptop to mitigate aspects of the course he deemed personally “irrelevant”:

DH: Is there anything that makes you more apt to look up from the com-puter and pay more attention to what the instructor is saying?

Brandon: Oh, I’ll be watching the slides and watching whatever is on my com-puter screen. If it looks like a new term or whatever … then it’s time to pay attention, but otherwise it’s just explanation of stuff that won’t be on the test.

DH: And when you actually are doing things on your computer, is it usually more recreational? Does it have to do with other courses that you’re taking?

Brandon: [laughs nervously] Sometimes I’ll review PowerPoints for other classes if I have an exam that day or a quiz. Sometimes I do Facebook, sometimes I do email, sometimes I do job stuff. I mean, it’s all over the place.

Brandon attempted to maximize his time by switching focus from the lectern to his laptop, depending on how he perceived he could miss the lecture materials and still pass the tests. However, the actual contours of his laptop use were not so strategically mapped out. When I observed Brandon, he would often click between email and several other Internet browser tabs, seemingly prompted by little more than whim (“it’s all over the place”). Like many web surfers (myself included), Brandon appeared content to vacillate his attentions among websites and activities as he saw fit, with few controlling devices governing what to view and for how long.

At the same time, Brandon’s playful browsing was situated within a larger strategy of attention allocation. Although his “personal” web use did not necessarily follow a rigid plan, he still took care to switch his concentration toward lecture whenever there arose material relevant for an assignment or exam. Brandon juggled his general disinterest in lectures with a pragmatic need to know the content of those lectures. In doing so, he tried to locate ways of playing within the boundaries of his roles and responsibilities as a stu-dent, at once collecting necessary information and maximizing his personal tine.

Brandon was not alone in these tactics. Among my most recurrent observations was the tendency of media users to attune their concentration to the lecture’s moment-by-moment exam relevance. During Sarah’s PowerPoints, students’ attentions were usually balanced, occasionally glancing up toward the lectern before directing their gazes back toward their screens. When Sarah entertained student questions, and hence discussed materials less likely to appear on exams, these same users would stare at their devices more uniformly. Other students pulled smartphones from their pockets, confident they could now “get away” with missing material, before stashing the electronics away again when the PowerPoint recommenced.

On the other end of the spectrum, Sarah’s test review days and explanations of written assignments received near-universal attention. Regardless of their overall interest levels, everyone recognized that these discussions were too important to ignore. (Even I would



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focus more sharply on Sarah in these instances, and the tests were optional for me!) Interestingly, the only other instances when students paid such attention to the front were when Sarah conducted group activities involving the interactive remotes issued at the start of the term. Here, Sarah would instruct students to divide into small groups and work on worksheets to be handed in at the end of class. Every several minutes, she would ask groups to transmit their current findings via remote, with aggregated class responses appearing on the projection screen. On these days, students would place their phones down and (sometimes awkwardly) turn to their nearest neighbor to work on the assign-ment. However, even in these instances, I observed many students stealing brief moments with their screens whenever they had downtime from completing the assignment early.

Limitations

My observations are not comprehensive. Not every student behaved in the way I describe. Some, including Chelsea and Donna mentioned earlier, openly passed each class on their iPhones with little focus at all directed toward the lectern. Many others, especially in the front rows, used laptops exclusively for typing notes or following the PowerPoint slides posted to the class website. Still others confined themselves to notebook and pencils for the entire hour, never pulling out laptop or phones at all. Even after auditing the course twice a week for a semester, I only skimmed the surface of all the scenarios and motiva-tions for why students used media in the ways they did. Other courses with different poli-cies on media use would undoubtedly have changed the activities of these students in different ways. A comparative exploration of these policies and their effects on students’ multitasking remains a rich site for future research and may confirm or challenge the representativeness of this classroom.

In addition, my interview with Brandon only represents one voice in a body of stu-dents, most of whom remained anonymous to both him and me. One resulting blind spot was any sustained analysis of non-media-using students in the class. Given my central concerns about the media-using students, I was less apt to consider the thoughts or expe-riences of the many participants who kept their devices turned off the entire period.

Conclusion

While in some ways a limitation on the scope of this study, the boundaries of anonymity within my class were notable in their own right. The size of the class served as both a catalyst and hindrance to multitasking, cloaking students with a sense of invisibility while also ensuring that they were always potentially viewable by peers. This sense of surveillance implicitly directed the strategies of media use that students performed, from muting their devices, to sitting in back rows, to stowing their screens from outlying eyes. It did not, however, seem to dissuade students who would have used their devices under other circumstances anyway. If nothing else, the presence of media seemed to visibly tier the class into camps of interested and disinterested students. Sarah mentioned, for instance, that students sitting in the front rows, who I rarely observed using media, often performed “better” in the course and were more recognizable to her through office hour visits. This observation echoes other research that has found inverse relationships between multitasking and individual academic performance (Junco, 2012).




Neither the mindless activity described by critics, nor the innovative one painted by digital cheerleaders, multitasking exists as a spatially bound, performative activity. Rather than decreasing the importance of co-present attention, new media use in my study allowed students to practice and allocate that attention according to particular log-ics. Ultimately, the disciplinary norms of immediate physical space still guided when and how digital engagements were conducted. Students used their awareness of co-present space to devise strategies of juggling personal media time with their educational respon-sibilities. In many cases, these strategies retained some sense of the primacy of class-room space. Although students were frequently willing to shut down their devices to concentrate on important lecture material, it was less common that anybody “tuned out” the instructor entirely to focus exclusively on text messages or emails.

So, where does all of this leave teachers? From a certain perspective, multitasking will never be the death knell of education. As Larry Rosen (2010: 91) argues, media-using students eventually become competent self-regulators, proactively adjusting their learning strategies and conditions when they realize they are falling behind. Faced with a semi-compulsory learning environment, many students will minimize distractive media activities to what they believe they can “get away with,” while still passing the course. In this way, media multitasking may not be substantially different from older examples of improper student conduct. Students have historically found plenty of ways to resist lec-ture before mobile phones ever appeared in their pockets, be it sleeping, solving cross-word puzzles, or staring blankly into space. New technologies at once continue and modify these familiar classroom practices. By this point in the 21st century, their appear-ances and their use have become as disruptive as they are utterly ordinary.

Of course, this is poor consolation to instructors attempting to create more engaged and critically minded classrooms. Syllabi must be written and, as we have seen, the inclusion or lack of specific media policies does have some effect on how students man-age their devices. Following the focus on co-presence emphasized by this study, I have observed at least two ways that instructors may strengthen student engagement in their classrooms. First and foremost, there is the ever-present necessity for active learning and participatory lecture models. While the call for active learning has become a cliché in higher education since the 1980s, the most effective teaching methods remain those com-bining direct student participation with strong instructor oversight. As noted, the liveliest days in Sarah’s class involved students dividing into small groups to work on carefully circumscribed tasks or worksheets. The anonymity of the large lecture broke down in these instances, with most students putting away their phones and laptops in order to more politely engage their neighbors. Even in the difficult context of a large class, there exist multiple options for involving students, including limited discussions, group exer-cises, and daily mini-quizzes (for examples, see Frederick, 1986; McKeachie, 2002).

Second, there exist oft-discussed, but less-implemented, strategies for integrating new media directly into lectures. This can take the form of the remote clickers that Sarah used in her class, or various exercises drawing upon students’ own devices. Numerous instructors have already experimented with gathering feedback from stu-dents for in-class demonstrations (Cheung, 2008), facilitating interactive quizzes (Scomavacca et al., 2009), and even live Twitter streams projected beside the day’s lecture notes (Young, 2009). All of these efforts aim for a “seamless infusion” of media within the rhythms of class time (Sulla, 2011: 136). Although we should be



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wary of simplistically associating new media with participatory learning, and be aware of the many economic and social barriers to students’ abilities to access or use this technology, such ideas may help to channel more students’ mediated attentions back toward class materials. As Liz Kolb (2008) notes, any classroom tool can be distracting when used inappropriately; the “key is to structure and control when the cell phones are used and when they are not used” (p. 13).

Ultimately, there will be no panacea for every challenge raised by classroom multi-tasking. So long as personal media remain integral to our everyday lives, it will be impossible to eliminate the potential for students using them in distracting ways. As teachers, it may be pragmatic to accept this and focus instead on how we can structure the interpersonal environments of our classrooms to reach the most students. Simple prohibitions or laissez-faire allowances probably will not work, but fostering more par-ticipatory environments may encourage more students to direct their attentions toward class (as this study suggests, other students will usually minimize the disruptiveness of their media use anyway). As researchers and scholars, we must recognize that we cannot fully understand new media outside of the spatial contexts in which they appear, or the ordinary affects that become attached to their use. The students in my study were often surprisingly self-aware about their media use, particularly how to perform it and how others would perceive it. These “commonsense” practices remain crucial areas for research as we continue to grapple with where engagement ends and distraction begins in this ever-emerging digital landscape.

Acknowledgements

A tremendous thanks to Mark Pedelty for supervising this project. I am also grateful to Justin Bergh, Diane Cormany, Alex Manning, Alison Rapp, and Wooyeol Shin for their feedback on early drafts, and the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1. Throughout this article, I use “multitasking” to refer to problematized combinations of media- and non-media-related tasks in classrooms, specifically those instances where the combina-tions distract the student away from lecture-related content. Multitasking, however, does not exist as a single activity or mode of attention allocation, and the discourses surrounding it often change across different settings (e.g. theaters, workplaces, automobiles).

2. My discussion focuses on educational settings in the West, particularly the United States. New media hold different connotations in classrooms throughout the world, and the strate-gies for dealing with their use vary accordingly. Chinese schools, for example, have gained notoriety for their especially strict enforcements of no-phone policies (e.g. Song, 2013).

3. This study was conducted for a seminar with blanket Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval.

4. I have changed all participants’ names to preserve confidentiality. All interviews were con-ducted with the informed consent of informants.




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Author biography

Dan Hassoun is a doctoral student in Communication and Culture at Indiana University. His work on discourses around media multitasking, mediated attention, and self-control is published or forthcoming in Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Television & New Media, and Cinema Journal.


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'All Over the Place': A Case Study of Classroom Multitasking and Attentional Performance

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