Empirical Evidence That Texting In Class = U Fail

Kate Hafner’s article, “Texting May Be Taking a Toll” claims that texting is an issue to teenagers around the world. As an illustration, Hafner starts the article by identifying that teenagers send a drastic amount of texts in their everyday lives. according to the Nielsen Company, “American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008”(1). This is just one of the examples of many that portrays teenagers around the world send many text messages. Along with teenagers sending many texts a day, hafner also shows in this article that texting is affecting teenager's life in many different ways for example, preventing teenagers' way of becoming independent. Just as professor Turkle presented,

In Michaela Cullington’s essay titled, “Does Texting Affect Writing?” the author tests the ongoing question of how today’s youth handles the effects of texting in the education system. Using successful evidence from both sides of the argument as well as participating in her own experiment, Cullington is able to fully demonstrate how texting does not interfere with today’s students and their abilities to write formally in the classroom.

End et al hypothesized that, “a cell phone ring originating from inside a classroom would impair participants’ performance on a recognition task and that a cell phone ring would decrease the probability that participants record critical lecture material in their notes.” (End et al. 55). They conducted an experiment to test this hypothesis. Seventy-one participants were recruited from the participant pool at the Xavier University psychology department (23 men, 48 women). They were undergraduate students, (average age 20.21 years), and 83% Caucasian. At the beginning of the experiment, participants were told they would be participating in a study examining the “psychology of note taking” for research credit.

With the advent of smartphones, the pressure of distractions on modern life have skyrocketed. Whereas people used to drive to work with nothing but the radio and traffic to divert their attention, today they could receive emails, text messages, and phone calls (Samost, Perlman, Domel, Reimer, Mehler, Mehler, & McWilliams, 2015). In classrooms across the nation, professors battle with the smartphones of distracted students who never seem to put their phones down. With this instant access to information comes the additional burden of social pressure to answer immediately, leading many people to succumb to the temptation to answer the phone or text message while in traffic or an

Texting has fast become the preferred form of communication for young adults; however, students need to be dissuaded from texting during class because of the result in loss of valuable class time, lack of effective communication skills, and consistent use of improper English leading to a negative impact on students’ learning.

One of the most significant ideas that the author mentions is that, a study was made and they found that, “college students who texted while doing homework had lower grades, and students who texted during class took less detailed notes and had poorer recall.” I think this is significant because, it is so true. How is a student going to take notes when they are texting while the teacher is talking or when they are doing homework they are texting? Therefore, they will miss a lot of important details that may be on a

To measure the dependent variable each participant was given a ten item multiple choice quiz five minutes after the presentation. All people participating were quizzed two times, one being while texting and once not texting at all.

Nicholas Carr in the essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” states “I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going--- so far as I can tell--- but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think.” This quote shows us how people are being affected by spending too much time using new technologies such as texting. Texting really does impact the way people think. While students are in school, they tend to write some of their paper in text form. This is because they are so used to using their phones and using the short texting forms that they forget how to actually write. I had this happen to me before. For example, in one of my English classes I had to write a quick one page essay on a book we were assigned to read. I started to write and once I finished I felt like it was pretty good. So, when I went back to proof read it, I realized that half of my paper was in short text form. I could not believe that I had done that. After I corrected all of my mistakes I turned in my paper. I was so glad that I looked over my essay before turning it in. Also, students would rather be on their phones than learning in school. While I am sitting in class, I always see people looking at their phones and not paying attention. Texting in class could cause you to fail and you would have to take the class over

Texting Cullington’s introduction is well-written the way she is describing when and where texting is coming in handy. This captures the reader’s attention and the eager in reading more to find out what Cullington is talking about. The essay contains information on the different perspective of texting. Cullington did not agree or disagree directly but used research of her own and discussed what her finding was. “My research suggests that texting actually has a minimal effect on student writing” (367).

David Kirp, professor at University of California, Berkeley, in “Text Your way to College”, through research finds that it is more effective to use texting to get to prospecting college students than anything else. By comparing students who received texts urging them to complete college requirements to those who did not receive such reminders, Kirp drew the conclusions that sending these reminders would help increase the amount of people who go through with plans for college. Kirp intends to bring to attention an incredibly inexpensive way to draw students to go to college, in order to further the growth of college educated Americans. It would seem to be Kirp’s objective to convince some administrations across the country to use texting as

Katie Hafner’s article, “Texting May Be Taking a Toll,” displays that the rising number of texts sent by adolescents day in and day out is starting to take a big toll on them, their lifestyle, and the people around them. To start off, in the first part of the article Hafner expresses that the point of the first section is that with a growing number of young people utilizing texting and using it nonstop texting is causing serious issues such as anxiety, failing grades, distraction in school, sleep issues and many others. The author exclaims in the section that, “The phenomenon is beginning to worry physicians and psychologists, who say it is leading to anxiety distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation.”

Especially, when research shows that children score higher in reading and vocabulary. Is texting the cause of these low grades? This bring into perspective a paper by Sylvia E. McDonald called “ The Effects and Predictor Value of In-Class Texting Behavior on Final Course Grades.” This study that she conducts looks at factors that contributes to whether a college freshman excels or not in college. Is texting really the problem? She does pull from other sources that state that ACT/SAT scores, GPA, and class attendance are the largest factors in predicting if a student will succeed. With this in mind, Sylvia McDonald conducts studies of a number of classes at a university. There are different “in class phone policies” she implements. At the end of each course completion the participant is surveyed to ascertain knowledge on final grades and “in class texting habits”. As a result, “The more a student participated in in-class texting behavior, the lower their final grade.” From this study, it becomes evident, that texting in class plays a significant factor when it comes to grades. The results of Sylvia McDonald’s study were sufficient to calculate a predictor value of 22% for the factor texting in class as the cause of low

Personally, I believe that texting is disruptive in class. On the other hand, respect goes both ways. The video didn’t state what the professor’s policy on texting was, but destroying someone else’s property is a bit too much. The professor could have just confiscated the cell phone and returned the cell phone when a parent was present. An article starts with the mention “of a video showing a sheriff’s deputy body-slamming a South Carolina high school student over her use of a cellphone in class.” (Gerson, 2015). Disruption is a problem, but using violence is not the answer. Gerson wrote of different ways that some instructors are dealing with the usage of cell phones in class. One comment was that establishing policies that respected

The aim of this project was to replicate a famous psychology study. I wanted to replicate the famous marshmallow experiment but with the restriction of using high school students I decided to test the same concept by conducting the experiment with cellphones. The hypothesis is that when both boys and girls receive a text girls will not check their phones as much as guys do. The variables are whether or not they receive a text and how quickly they pick up their phones.

After not receiving significant reactions to the message tone we decided to use phone calls. While using phone calls the action of checking their phones increased from two people to seven. This informed us that the main factors that affected this experiment was volume level of the phone. While I sat within the class I could not hear the other experimenters text tones this affected the results entirely. Some participants look around as if they were confused whether they heard something or not. Only students who responded by checking their phones were, the ones who sat directly across from the experimenter with the text alert going