Effects Of Distraction On Learning

Distraction and its Effects on Learning
UBC Student #: 38520110
Word Count: 1192 The learning process in humans is complex, and depends on a number of environmental factors. This essay will explore the impact of several of these common distractors on storing and retrieving information, as relevant to a typical college student who is studying and writing tests. The first distractor is auditory; in the context of a college student this could be loud roommates, background music, or a busy lecture hall. Another regular source of interruptions are through text messaging, an all too common sight in any college environment, where students busy social lives present many opportunities for distraction. The majority of the research shows that these
Due to the difficulty in isolating auditory stimuli, it is important that the impact of the varying forms are analysed to select an environment that is suitable for studying. It has been shown that the effect of auditory stimuli on cognitive function is related to how the sound could impact our current activity, rather than the noise itself being a distraction (Zeamer & Tree, 2013). As such, sounds that come in out of context of the current environment, tend to be sudden and jarring, and can divert attention through an evolutionary reaction that evokes the sympathetic nervous system (Zeamer & Tree, 2013). Zeamer and Tree (2013) examined the impact of auditory stimulation in a lecture setting by exposing students to a number of different ambient and active streams of sound such as construction, movement, unrelated lecture material, laughter, and murmurs. When completing a multiple choice quiz after the lecture, it was found that students exposed to the unrelated lecture material and laughter scored the lowest. It was theorized that the brain's evolutionary instinct and familiarity to the human voice predisposed it to distraction from these
In a lecture environment, if a student is texting they cannot continue to devote their full attention to the lecturer and must multi-task, which is something that research has repeatedly shown to detrimental to the learning process (Dietz & Henrich, 2016). Dietz & Henrich set out to test the impact of texting in a lecture setting on learning by having students in texting and non-texting groups complete a multiple choice quiz after a simulated lecture. They found that students who were in the texting group performed significantly lower than the non-texting group. In another environment, students reading a passage while texting were found to take longer to read the passage, but scored similarly to a non-texting group when quizzed on the passage (Bowman, Levine, Waite & Gendron). A take away from these studies is that actively texting in a live setting where multi-tasking will be required will result in impaired learning, while in a situation where focus can be switched between texting and studying, learning outcomes can still be