UAlbany Analysis Finds Mobile Phone Distractions Adversely Affect Learning in Young Adults

By Bethany Bump

ALBANY, N.Y. (Sept. 17, 2024) — A new analysis by University at Albany researchers in the School of Education has found that young adults exposed to mobile technology distractions had worse learning outcomes in the classroom compared to those without distractions.

The analysis, titled “Mobile multitasking in learning: A meta-analysis of effects of mobile phone distraction on young adults’ immediate recall,” was published Friday in the journal Computers in Human Behavior. Authored by Quan Chen, Zheng Yan, Mariola Moeyart and Robert Bangert-Drowns, it is the first meta-analysis to precisely estimate the effect of mobile phone distractions on students’ immediate recall of lectures and reading materials.

“There are about 1,500 empirical studies published on this topic in the last 20 years, but the majority have used surveys,” said Yan, a professor in the Department of Educational & Counseling Psychology. “These kinds of surveys rely on self-reporting that sometimes occurs long after the distraction and are based on very general questions and subjective answers, so it can be hard to generate robust evidence.”

For their analysis, the authors reviewed 27 well-designed, randomized controlled experiments that measured learning recall through tests administered immediately after a lecture or reading. Their analysis concluded that mobile technology distractions had a statistically significant, negative effect on the ability of college-age students to recall the content of lectures and readings.

“This indicates that students in the mobile phone distraction group performed significantly lower than students in the no distraction group,” the authors wrote.

The analysis was born out of a dissertation by Chen, a former doctoral student in the School of Education who had previously studied the link between mobile phone distractions and driving. For her dissertation, she proposed a meta-analysis that would examine the impact on learning.

“We think this was important because we know that New York and other states are starting to consider banning mobile phones in schools,” said Yan, who chaired her dissertation committee.

For the data analysis, they turned to Moeyart and Bangert-Drowns, who are Chen's dissertation committee members and experts in meta-analysis — a statistical analysis that aims to synthesize a large collection of results from individual studies for the purposes of integrating findings and generating conclusions.

While the nearly 1,500 studies to date have generated abundant empirical evidence on the topic of mobile technology distractions and learning, they have not yet led to a robust or consistent conclusion, partially due to their diverse study designs and variables, Yan said.

To account for this, the UAlbany researchers only selected studies for their analysis that were based on peer-reviewed, randomized controlled experiments that randomly assigned participants to a mobile phone distraction group or a control group without mobile phone distractions. Selected studies also had to focus on objective, specific and immediate testing of learning, rather than subjective, general or delayed assessment of learning.

The 27 studies that were selected investigated the effect of mobile technology distractions such as texting, online chatting, email and social media on recall test performance, including both lecture recall and reading recall. Collectively, the experiments measured outcomes from 2,245 participants who were an average age of 21 years old.

The estimated overall effect size across the 27 experiments showed a medium-sized negative effect on lecture and reading recall that was statistically significant, the analysis found. There was a large negative effect on lecture recall specifically.

Because only four of the 27 experiments examined reading recall and the effects were split, it was difficult to “perform a thorough meta-analysis and draw a credible conclusion” on reading recall, the authors wrote.

This will be an important area for future research, they noted. Further research should also examine the impact of mobile distractions on different aspects of reading performance, such as reading efficiency, and other important learning tasks such as writing, understanding, problem-solving, analyzing, decision-making and knowledge transfer, they said.

In addition, impacts should be measured across more diverse populations, such as K-12 students, adult professionals, senior citizens and others.

“Only with this effort, it is possible to ultimately obtain a complete scientific understanding of the effect of mobile phone distract on diverse populations rather than just one single population,” they wrote.