We’re not built for multitasking and anyone who tells you they are is lying to you. There are some really smart people at Stanford who’d like to prove that to you.
People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found.
That’s a good summary, but here’s my favorite quote from the article.
“They’re suckers for irrelevancy,” said communication Professor Clifford Nass, one of the researchers whose findings are published in the Aug. 24 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Everything distracts them.”
It’s weird that we spend so much time trying to cram knowledge into students’s heads when—if we show them how to identify reliable research—they can find the answers on their own. Meanwhile, we completely overlook the fact that we’re—I’m talking about teachers as well as students here—are completely unequipped to deal with the fire hose of information coming at us. I’m pretty sure that we’d a much bigger return on our investment if we focused on process skills rather than how well a kid can remember what they could’ve just looked up on their iPhone.
(via Stanford University News)
