Studying with social media

A pediatrician who follows social-media research! How cool is that?! Concerning the effects on young people of large amounts of time in and multitasking with digital media, parent Perri Klass, M.D., cites researchers as saying that, basically, the jury's still out. She refers to pediatrics professor Dimitri Christakis at the University of Washington saying that young people may have some advantages in the new-media space because they're coming of age in it. "So I decided to test my digital-immigrant biases," Klass writes in the New York Times, "which tell me that no one can study effectively while watching, listening, surfing, messaging, against my professional experience, which tells me that medical students who don’t study effectively can’t learn the huge and complex body of material they have to master, and will therefore not pass their frequent tests." She asked her medical-student son and classmates about their study habits. Definitely read the piece to find out what she learned – and there's some great advice, too, from a psychologist she talked to, for parents worried about their kids' "terrible" study habits. Because we all, as a society, have so much to learn about the effects of growing up online, I wish all pediatricians could be as informed and open-minded about social media. They could help parents calmly apply the good parenting sense they already have and stay a little open-minded too. That, in turn, will keep parent-child communication lines open, one of the best Internet protections around. [And BTW, there are some things we do know from the research, at least about informal learning in social media (we put those in "Online Safety 3.0."]

Multitasking myths

A new study has found that multitasking during homework can slow things down but doesn't harm the performance of an academic task. "Students who send and receive instant messages while completing a reading assignment take longer to get through their texts but apparently still manage to understand what they’re reading," Education Week reports, citing the study by psychology Prof. Laura L. Bowman at Central Connecticut State University. For the research, students were divided into three groups – one that did no IM-ing while reading an assignment; one that answered IMs first, then did the reading; and a third multitasking group that chatted in IM while reading. "The third group took about 15 minutes longer than the other two groups to complete the reading - roughly 50% more time than the other two groups took. See also what "digital native" blogger Diana Kimball says about other recent research on the subject and what to do about "switch tasking," one of the types of multitasking discussed in The Myth of Multitasking, by Dave Crenshaw: "The key," she says to parents, "lies in laying out the facts and discussing strategies.... Writing a stellar book report might not be a cause compelling enough to warrant total focus, every young person will at some point find a pursuit worth paying attention to. Maybe it’s writing short stories; maybe writing music. Maybe it’s making art. But when that pursuit comes along, they’re going to want to know how to firewall their attention, focus their efforts, and - for once - stop switching." She says limiting teens' Net access doesn't work.