A Study On The Influence Of College Students' Multitasking Behavior On Explanatory Text Reading

The rapid development of Internet technology and new media technology has a significant impact on people's daily life and learning.More and more students intentionally or unintentionally combine the online or offline audio and video,sending and receiving instant messages and e-mails,with other tasks,such as reading,homework and classroom learning.This phenomenon is known as multitasking and concerned by many researchers.Such as,Foehr(2006)[1]pointed out that the 8 to 18 year olds,81%simultaneous use multiple media system,and the two most popular media activity is watching TV and listening music when reading.Junco&Cotton(2012)[]2 reported that 51%of respondents reported that they send text messages,and 33%reported using Facebook,while doing schoolwork in a survey of 1,649 college undergraduates.Similarly,Levine et al.(2007)[3]also pointed out that 33%of the students receive instant messages when they are engaged in academic work,while the other students engage in another activity in the field of instant messaging.However,reading is the most popular activity for students to learn.Exploring reading in multitasking is one aspect of the effect of multitasking on learning.Under this background,this research considered the type of multitasking,multitasking level,reading achievement and time,through contrast test,to explore the influence of multitasking to reading effect and attention.As follows:Above all,conducting a questionnaire survey among 380 college students to find out the current situation of College Students' media use and multitask behavior.Again,by using the method of experiment,selected 68 students,through the design of hypertext reading laboratory experiment,the learner was divided into three groups(video multitasking,audio multitasking and without multitasking).In addition,during the experiment.using the physiological signal-measuring instrument recorded the concentration data,immediately after carried out the retention test.Results show that:(1)The most popular media for college students are smartphones,computers and books.(2)College Students' average multitasking behavior index is 3.75.In other words,college students will simultaneously or quickly switch in 4 activities.(3)Video multitasking group's reading scores was significantly lower than the audio multitasking group and the group of only reading.In addition,there is no significant differences in the audio multitaskinig group and the group of only reading.(4)The reading time of video multitasking group and audio multitasking group is obviously more than the group of only reading.(5)There was no significant differences between the learners with high degree and with low degree of multitasking in the explanatory text scores.Finally,this paper has carried on the theoretical explanation to the multitasking phenomenon of university students.Also discussed theoretically the influence of multitasking behavior on the reading effect,and given the future research direction.