Can students really multitask? The case of mobile learning

The advent of mobile learning offers opportunities to do two things at once in an educational context. Two experiments were set up to examine the effect of performing a secondary task while learning with a mobile device. The experimental group had to combine a learning task with a secondary task. The control group only had to perform a learning task. Additionally, participants of the experimental group received different instructions (“doing both tasks as good as possible”, “learning score is important” or “screwing score is important”). Afterwards, all the participants had to complete a learning test and participants of the experimental group also received a screwing score. In general, the effect of condition on the learning task was rather limited. Only one significant effect was found and it was limited to a difference between students of the control group who outperformed the students focusing on the screwing task while learning.status: publishe