The Importance Of Distractions Among College Students

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The quality of one 's studying time is only as good as one 's ability to concentrate while studying. Decreasing the amount of distractions while studying can increase productivity and effectiveness, however; the modern American life is full of distractions. The advancing of technology and social networks are leading to an increase in the amount of distractions one person has everyday. Distraction is the diverting of an individual’s attention from a chosen object of attention onto the source of distraction. Distractions include things like noise, people talking, music, distracting thoughts and anything else that takes your attention away from the original task. These distractions can lead to a decrease in the effectiveness of studying.
David,
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Distractions were assessed using remote surveillance cameras, a head mounted point-of-view camera, and a mobile eye tracker. This study also observed distractions during homework/study completion in relation to mood such as negative and positive affect, and task motivation. Their results showed, that students spent an average of 73 minutes listening to music while studying. Overall, students included in this study had an average of 35 distractions of at least six seconds or longer over the three hour session. Higher homework task motivation was associated with shorter and less distractions, while greater negative affect was associated to longer distraction times (Calderwood et al., …show more content…
To gather data, the researchers used an online survey. They had a large sample of 1839 college students. The survey asked questions like how often do you do schoolwork at the same time that you are doing the following activities: Facebook, email, IM, talking, texting.. etc. The results for this study showed that their sample spent the most time searching items online and using Facebook. The hierarchical linear regression to predict overall GPA was significant (Junco et al. 2012). In regards to demographics, males had lower GPAs. In conclusion, ICTs were negatively predictive of overall GPA.
It has been suggested that distractions are associated with lower academic performance (Junco, 2012; Junco and Cotten, 2012). The primary aim of this observational study is to examine the relationship between gender and distractions while studying. We will be observing common distractions while studying: mobile phone usage, listening to music and engaging in a conversation. We hypothesised that gender does have an effect on distractions. We aim to support that males are more distracted than females, and that a cell phone is the most common distraction while studying for college

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