1. Distractibility and Its Impacts Drs. Kevin S. Krahenbuhl & Gabe Mydland Dakota State University

2. Background for Context Distractibility is invariably part of our lives It is seeming to become ever more prominent thanks in large part to the vast social networks accessible and used in the digital age We know that our working memory is limited in its duration and capacity (Peterson & Peterson, 1959; Miller, 1956) The direct impact has not been extensively evaluated in social networking distractibility

3. The Investigation Pilot in spring 2013 ran to test out the method and refine it based on its performance 2013-2014 collected large data sample from the university for participation – Participating instructors asked to pick a favorite topic of theirs that students would be unfamiliar with and give a 30-minute lecture on it so students’ didn’t perceive it as irrelevant Since then, we’ve been implementing small-scale interventions in an attempt to find practices that might show measurable gains

4. The Initial Findings ** Pre test scores much higher than normal due to one topic being widely known by students **

5. Student Perceptions Survey Responses – Significant differences between Respondus & Distracted groups with respect to… I learned a lot today I paid attention to the lecture Interesting Comment “I guess I wasn’t that distracted since I improved my score by 5!” (shows disconnect with comparison) Interesting distinction between M/F perception on the impact of being distracted – Male respondents in the distracted group believed that they were less distracted than female participants (difference was significant)

6. Study Analysis Something to consider – This experiment is focused on a one-time 30-min. lecture – In a typical course, how many lectures would you have between exams? – Multiply the # of those by the difference to find out how much distracted students would be behind focused ones Example: 8 lectures, students in the multitasking group performed approximately 16% worse on average Distracted student starts off 128% behind (8*16) if this trend continues for eight lectures

7. 2 Attempted Interventions Simple Cold-Calling every 2 slides The students in the multitasking group have performed slightly better indicating that this compels increased engagement but the results are not significant Using Nearpod For those who don’t have access to “Respondus”, Nearpod is a free online tool that we’ve run in two small pilot tests and found results have similar outcomes as those of the experiment here using Respondus Lockdown Browser

8. The Findings

9. Questions? What Interventions do you suggest?