Texting,surfing,studying?

And Dr Victor C Strasburger,a professor at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine,said,Kids are spending an extraordinary amount of time with media, but added: We dont really know what they pay attention to,what they dont. We dont know how it impacts their school performance,whether it impacts their school performance.

A recent and much-discussed study showed decreased productivity in adults who were multitasking-or as Dr Christakis put it,The truth is you dont really multitask,you just think you do; the brain cant process two high-level cognitive things. What you are actually doing,he went on,is oscillating between the two.
So are teenagers any better at oscillating?
It may be that multitasking is more of a problem for us old brains, Professor Hobbs said. Dr Christakis speculated that teenagers might have some advantages,partly because of their presumably greater mental dexterity and partlyand this is the part we dont understand, he saidbecause they really have come of age with these technologies.

That generational and technological gap reflects all the unanswered questions about what it means to grow up in this era,and probably accounts for some of the bewilderment many parents feel as they watch their children navigate the many and varied connections of modern adolescence.
Parents are digital immigrants,Dr Christakis said; children are digital natives. In the 20th century,you worried about a digital divide separating rich from poor, he said. Thats narrowed,and the one thats emerging is separating parents from their children. Were fairly clueless about the digital world they inhabit.

So where does all this leave parents trying to help their own digital natives develop good study habits? Harris M Cooper,a professor of psychology at Duke who has spent many years studying homework and its effects,says its important to keep in mind the overarching purpose of the assignment.

One of the things that homework is supposed to do for us is help us generalise where we feel we can learn, he told me,adding that part of successful adult functioning is matching the task to the context. In other words,you have to learn how you work and under what circumstances.
So I decided to test my digital immigrant biaseswhich tell me that no one can study effectively while watching,listening,surfing,messagingagainst my professional experience,which tells me that medical students who dont study effectively cant learn the huge and complex body of material they have to master,and will,therefore,not pass their frequent tests. In other words,I asked my son and his friends,people in their early to middle 20s who do an awful lot of studying.

These medical students did sound like expert studiers,in that they had paid close attention to the different kinds of concentration required for different tasks.
If Im studying to memorise, my son told me,Im still usually chattinginstant messaging,that is. But its usually not real-time chatting. Ill look up every once in a while and Ill chat; I may have a movie going on in the background,but Ill go for a movie Ive already seen.

He had even conducted an experiment: So I did a time study where I calculated on average how many pages of a paper I could read when I had a movie on in the background versus when I didnt. I found I could read at about 80 per cent efficiency. So the distraction was worth it; it meant he could go on reading for much longer stretches.

That question of how to keep yourself studying for long periods preoccupied other medical students. One said she did her best studying at the gym,usually on the elliptical machines; she taped the lectures and played them over at a fast speed while working out.
But you cant work out all the time. The day before a big test, she said,I usually do go to the gym and listen and work through one of the lectures that I might feel is more important,and then I would just go through everything.

As an immigrant,I will always lack a certain fluency when it comes to the digital world. And learning how we learn,the overarching assignment that Dr Cooper described,is one that we parents cant complete for our childrenno,not even the most hopelessly over-involved parents,the ones who stay up all night putting together the seventh-grade biology poster. You know who you are.
The advice my older son gave me about my younger son was,Dont worry about it till theres something to worry about. If hes doing well in his classes and his homework,fine! And that was also Dr Coopers advice to parents: If theyre doing well,permitting them to have some choice permits them to find their own style.

Ah,but I thought to myself mournfully,I still feel that something is lost. What about the all-consuming pleasure of reading something,really reading something,with no distractions? And the creative complexity of writing,making language flow from sentence to sentence,listening only to your inner voice?
And then I reflected on my own work habits,and the ways I have adopted the new customs,and I wondered: Is this the slightly suspect nostalgia of the immigrant for the lovely but already mythological terrain that she herself has left behind?
Perri Klass,NYT