Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, Vol 8(4), Dec 2022, 269-278; doi:10.1037/stl0000314
Students often multitask during class and while reading content, which can impair academic achievement, especially during online teaching, when they cannot be monitored. People also prefer to restudy class content by rereading, which is not very effective in promoting lasting learning compared with retrieval practice, that is, trying to recall information to which one has been previously exposed. We investigated whether the negative long-term recall effects of encoding content while multitasking (reading text messages on a cell phone while reading to-be-remembered information from texts presented onscreen), could be reduced by subsequent retrieval practice (answering multiterm or fact questions about the texts) instead of rereading text information. Sixty undergraduates took part in this within-participant, randomized, repeated measure experiment which manipulated exposure to content (no multitasking or multitasking) followed by reexposure to content (rereading or retrieval practice). We found that answering questions about texts (retrieval practice) that were read with and without multitasking, both led to better recall 7 days later than texts read with multitasking followed by rereading. Hence, we showed that providing retrieval practice opportunities can potentially partially mitigate the adverse effects of multitasking while studying. Judgments of learning showed that participants believe that rereading was a more effective technique than retrieval, whereas the results showed the opposite was true. However, participants were aware that multitasking during reading was less effective than reading without multitasking. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)