Teaching Tip: Dealing With Student Cellphone Use During Your OM Lectures

Students and their devices have become virtually inseparable, writes Faculty Focus (Jan. 8, 2014). They are using them constantly and find it difficult to disconnect for any amount of time. When they’re texting, looking at Facebook, or cruising on the Internet and listening to your OM lecture and trying to take notes, they aren’t dealing with the content as well as they would be if they just focused on listening and note taking. And the evidence of that keeps accumulating. The research below found: “. . . students who use their mobile phones during class lectures tend to write down less information, recall less information, and perform worse on tests than those who abstain from using their mobile phones during class.”

Can we get students to put away their phones and focus on learning? Even with a policy and overt attempts to enforce it, without constant surveillance, it is very, very difficult to ensure that students are not using their devices. If your class is large, it is all but impossible. And that kind of vigilant enforcement is not without costs to you as enforcer.

Here is an alternative: Give your normal presentation in class. Then 5 minutes before class ends, distribute or post a list of your 5 or 6 essential points made. Students could check their notes, or you could have students trade notes so that someone else is doing the checking, and see how many of those points they had. Some students may miss a few of the points because they aren’t all that good at taking notes. But were some of the students who missed most (all) of the points also texting or surfing during class? Encourage them to ask themselves the question and to look honestly at the evidence revealed by their notes. No, you aren’t going to be providing one of these lists at the end of every class, but you may consider doing it sometime during the next couple of weeks as the new semester begins. And if students are really interested in knowing how texting affects what they’re getting out of class, they should try listening and taking notes without doing anything else.

Reference: Kuznekoff. J. H. and Titsworth, S. (2013). The impact of mobile phone usage on student learning. Communication Education, 62 (3), 233-252.