How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Cell Phones

Cat on the Phone

In the past I wrote about some big problems I have with cell phones:

1. Students are rude with their cell phones
2. Cell-phone bans cause students significant anxiety.

Science is the best way to understand the universe and solve our problems; I wanted to tackle this problem scientifically. So I applied The Method.

First step: ask an answerable question. This is a bit harder than it might at first seem, since whatever question I ask will need some definitions so that it can be answered. Simply asking, "What is best?" is not sufficient unless we all agree on what "best" is. So here is what I came up with:

How much cell-phone use in class results in the greatest academic achievement, course engagement, and student satisfaction?

That question has three measurable outcomes, as long as I define how I will measure those results. So for the purposes of this experiment I used the following operational definitions:

• Academic achievement was measured by overall course grade (points out of 1000).
• Course engagement was measured by counting good-questions asked per class.
• Student Satisfaction was measured by an end-of-course evaluation by students.

The next step is to do background research so I read a multitude of articles about cell-phones and attention, cell-phones and learning, anxiety and learning, cell-phones and anxiety, and many other permutations of the key-words: cell-phone, learning, anxiety, engagement, classroom, and teaching. After weeks of literature review I thought I was ready to design my study.

Since I was teaching three sections of Introduction to Psychology on the same day that semester. I planned a different cell-phone policy for each class and put the relevant information in the syllabus.

VERBOTEN!

1. Verboten: "There will be NO cell-phone use during class. Phones must be off or on silent, remember that vibrations are sounds, turn your phone off.. If I see your phone out I will take it and put it on my desk for the duration of class. If you are expecting an emergency call inform the caller ahead of time to wait and call after class time, or do not come to class until your anxiety about your potential emergency has been resolved. After your third offense I will begin to penalize your course grade. " (Note: Thankfully no students called my bluff on the harshness of this policy.)

2. Permissive: There was no statement about cell-phones in the syllabus and I ignored completely any use or ringing of cell-phones.

3. Interval: "The class will be organized into roughly 20-minute blocks of activity (20 minutes of lecture, 20 minutes of video, 20 minutes of group work, 20 minutes of an in-class activity, etc.). During these times you may not use your cell-phone, not even for texting. However, between blocks there will be 2-5 minutes of transition time during which you are free to check your messages, send a tweet, update your status, or whatever it is you do on your phones. I will make clear announcements about when it is cell-time and when it is class-time before and after these transitions."

I generated a lot of usable data from this semester and went about analyzing the results. As far as academic achievement was concerned there was no significant difference between all three courses. The Interval section had significantly greater course engagement and student satisfaction (even out scoring the cell-phone permissive section). So to interpret and speculate a bit, I think this shows that good students are still good students regardless of cell-phone policy (they probably weren't using their phones even when allowed) and bad students are still bad students even if they aren't texting. But, students engage with the course more when they are not anxious about their missed messages while remaining free from texts for large blocks of class time. I also speculate that student satisfaction is directly influenced by higher classroom engagement.

The last step will be to share my results, which I suppose I am doing here, but I'm also preparing a manuscript to share with the larger scholarship of teaching and learning community. In the mean time I have adopted the interval policy in all of my courses since. Thank you Science!

SoTL: Maryville SoTL Conference 2012

Last weekend I attended a conference hosted by Maryville University. The theme of the conference was Integrating the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Into Academic Culture. I like teaching conferences; all too often teaching is a lonely pursuit. I go to my classes I do my thing, I kvetch with my colleagues about students, but often the actual planning and execution of a class occurs in a vacuum.  That is to say that we (teachers) rarely share or collaborate with each other on topics like course design and classroom management. So teaching conferences are a great way to meet with other teachers and talk about what we do and discover better ways to do it.

In the keynote address Peter Felton (Elon University) asked us the question, "How intentional are you towards your course?" I feel that over the last four years I've done so much to try and transform my course into a student-centered learning experience, so I'd say I'm fairly intentional. I am primarily teaching a general education required course, so there are a lot of topics that I must address, but I feel that I go a long way to bring education to my students in innovative ways (with varying degrees of success). But I think this is a great and fundamental question that we (still teachers) can all use to evaluate our efforts.

Another workshop I attended was presented by Michael Palmer (University of Virgina) titled, "The 5% Rule, or Teaching As a Scholarly Act." The idea being that if one of my teaching goals were to get five percent better at teaching every year, how would I measure my success? Teachers are scholars. We went to school for quite sometime and studied significantly to sharpen our scholarly skills. We can apply the skills to our teaching by researching our teaching and the learning of our students. I've done a little of this in the past, but I'm not doing it currently. I think over the next few weeks I'd like to decide on an area of my teaching to improve (student engagement, learning outcomes, or some such) and start a research project centered around it.

The last session that I'll write about here was presented by Randall Osbourne (Texas State University) titled, "Tolerance for Ambiguity: Knowing Which Students are Better Prepared for the Ambiguity of SoTL Approaches." Without drilling down into the specifics of the research, the theme of this presentation was that students with a higher tolerance for ambiguity (ToA) are more successful in courses designed with a more student-centered approach. Additionally using the active-learning model (ALM) helps to increase ToA and thus student success. This is important for me because I have found the greatest barrier that students face in my class is the ambiguity of some assignments, and maybe integrating some of the ALM techniques will help my students.

In sum, I thought this was a great conference and it really helped me to crystalize my thinking on ways I might improve my course and my teaching. I hope to implement some of these ideas in the coming semester and get started with a new SoTL research project. But next up is the Focus on Teaching and Technology conference at UMSL, and if any colleagues are interested in attending together please let me know.

Cell Phone Anxiety

Editor's Selection Icon Earlier I wrote about cell phone rudeness in the classroom. In that post I mentioned that asking students to go without cell phones is like asking them to go without friends. That statement generated a lot of interest from faculty and students int he comments, on facebook, and in person so I thought I would share a little bit of research that backs up my statement.

In a recently published article (see below for reference) Dorothy Skierkowski and Rebecca Wood tracked college-aged youth's anxiety over a 3- or 5-day texting restriction. That is to say, for three or five days participants in the study were not allowed to use text messaging. In spite of the studies extremely small sample size (n=23), they had some interesting results. They found that participants that were identified has high-volume texters (greater than 92 texts per day on average) thought about texting an average of 47 times per day during the restricted period. Even the low-volume texters thought about it 23 times on average. In psychology we might consider those repetitive worrisome thoughts as rumination, a hallmark of anxiety.

Another important finding from this study involved the open-ended survey responses from students collected during the restriction. The authors sum those responses with the following sentence:

 "Clearly, asking students to restrict their texting behavior made a powerful impact on most study participants, to the extent that some were not able to refrain from doing so, a large number believed their relationships had worsened over the duration of the study, and most endured the effects of texting restriction with a moderate to high degree of annoyance, anxiety, and/or stress. "

So it is because of this and similar studies that I think we need to review the idea of the cell-phone ban in the classroom setting. While this study involved restricted use over a matter of days, it was still observed that students frequently thought about texting and failed to comply with text-messaging restrictions. So my fear is that banning cell phones might be just as detrimental to learning as allowing them in class. I decided to do my own experiment to gather data on how cell phones impact learning in MY classroom. I let you know how that turned out in a future post.

UPDATE: If  you are interested in statistics you might like my follow-up to this post which more closely examines the statistics in this article.

Dorothy Skierkowski & Rebecca M. Wood (2012). To text or not to text? The importance of text messaging among college-aged youth Computers in Human Behavior, 28 (2), 744-756 DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2011.11.023