Study On College Students’ Media Multitasking While Learning

The development of emerging media and technology in combination of various forms of media increases the possibility for the learners to engage in multiple media activities, which behavior—also known as media multitasking, may have great influence on their study. However, domestic research on media multitasking in certain learning context is relatively scarce. In order to conduct a deeper and more extensive research on the status quo, influencing factors and results of media multitasking among Chinese college students, this study attempts to combine qualitative and quantitative methods to explore these questions.Study 1 aimed to investigate what media activities the Chinese college students engaged in while learning and also tried to figure out the influencing factors and results of the behavior. Thirty-two college students in Wuhan were interviewed by the qualitative method of semi-structured interview. Based on the grounded theory, this paper analyzes the contents of the interview, and the main findings are as follows:first, the main media types that college students engaged in while learning, include social, entertainment and academic assistant, specifically social media, instant messaging, music, news, games, online shopping, looking up words, search resources and academic help-seeking; second, the influencing factors include the learners’ personality, mood status, self-regulation strategies, social, task factors and environment factors; third, the media multitasking could have negative impacts, including reducing learning efficiency, decreasing learning quality, and triggering guilty and anxiety, yet it also has some positive impacts, including motivating learning, reorganizing thought, and making learners relaxed and happy.Study 2 aimed to explore how subjective learning task difficulty and metacognition influence learners’ media multitasking while learning. Eight hundred and forty-two college students were investigated by the scenario questionnaire. A 2×2 mixed design was employed. The results show that subjective learning task difficulty and metacognition have impacts on learners’media multitasking while learning. Specifically, compared with the learners with lower metacognition, the learners with higher metacognition tend to engage in less media actives unrelated to the learning task when facing the more difficult tasks.Based on the two studies, we could draw following educational implications: learners should study in a quite learning environment with a good learning atmosphere, and cut off media devices, in order to reduce the possibility of media multitasking and decrease the negative impact on study brought by the media activities unrelated to learning; if learners could reasonably take the media activities as relaxing tools, without switching frequently between study tasks and media activities unrelated to study, it could be helpful to resuming their study; if learners’metacognition could be improved, the media multitasking while study could be less, therefore the negative impact on study could be reduced; while paying attention to the media multitasking while study, we should focus more on why learners do so and what they do with the media, rather than which media they use.