Estelle 1

Chuck Estelle
Dr. Reid
English 101
22 October 2015
Annotated Bibliography
Unfortunately, multitasking has become an everyday thing in the lives of people all over
the planet today. People multitask when they are at work, school, studying or even when doing
something simple like cleaning a house. We think that this is a great thing but in reality, it is most
certainly not especially when it comes to school. Most kids in college are always on their phones
while trying to learn in class and this takes away from the information that they should be
obtaining. When students are on their phones in class and while studying, their attention span
shortens and the ability to retain information gets much worse. Media multitasking is the worst
form of multitasking and this is seen and millions of college students across the nation on a daily
basis.
Duncan, Douglas K., Angel R. Hoekstra, and Bethany R. Wilcox. "Digital Devices, Distraction,
and Student Performance: Does In-Class Cell Phone Use Reduce Learning?" Astronomy
Education Review 11.1 (2012): 1-5. Web. 10 Oct. 2015.
Douglas, Hoekstra and Wilcox talk about how the use of cell phones by students in class
lowers their performance in school. They talk about surveys that were taken on cell phone use
during class lectures. After one survey was taken, it was true that nearly 75% of students use
their cell

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phone regularly during class lectures. Digital devices have been a huge distraction to students in
college today and it is getting worse and worse all the time.
This article was written three years ago so it is fairly accurate if not, a little
underestimated. It provides a lot of useful evidence that will lead up to the main point that I am
trying to make. Since it was written only three years ago, it is very credible and has updated
information. It offers a lot of information on how laptops and phones are distracting students in
class lectures.
This article fits into the research topic of how multitasking decreases student performance
and attention span because it gives the results of specific surveys that support my argument. In
the survey, over 300 students were asked how often they use their phone during class and their
GPA. At the end of the survey, it was concluded that students who used their phone more than
five times, had an average GPA of 2.8. The kids who never looked at their phone, averaged a 3.3.
This is a significant difference in grade point average and just goes to show how distracting these
devices really are.
Eleanor Vincent. Driven To Distraction Amwa Journal (2012): 1. Web. 10 Oct. 2015.

Driven To Distraction is mainly about a woman named Eleanor Vincent who got
addicted to an app on her phone. She explains how she downloaded Words With Friends on her
phone and has been distracted from her work because of it. She says that her obsession
with winning has been a huge distraction to her. It prevented her from writing and every time she
was bored, she would pick up her phone and play for hours.

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This article was also written only three years ago so it is fairly updated and accurate. This
article provides a story from an individual who was extremely distracted by her phone. It got in
the way of her work and it shows how quickly a person can get distracted and how real the
problem is. It also puts more emphasis on the problem because a story is being told by someone
who went through it first hand.
The article explains how a persons phone distracted her from her work. The article does
not give any factual information on multitasking or distractions but it does give a good
description of someone who went through the problem. The article however, does lack actual
information about attention span and performance. It just states what happened to Eleanor
Vincent. Although, after reading this short article, I do believe that this could be useful in my
paper because I can use her as an example of someone who allowed their phone get in the way of
their work and how it affected her.

Levine, Laura E., Bradley M. Waite, and Laura L. Bowman. "Electronic Media Use, Reading,
and Academic Distractibility in College Youth."CyberPsychology & Behavior 10.4
(2007): 560-66. Web. 10 Oct. 2015.

Levine, Bradley and Bowman focus on how activities that require more work and more
attention are decreasing among people. It talks about how attention spans are shortening because
of IMing and texting and how this is causing a lack of concentration in young people. Also, it
discusses the results of surveys taken by college students. These surveys prove that multitasking
is harmful to performance in the classroom and while doing homework.

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Laura Levine, Bradley Waite and Laura Bowman are all from Central Connecticut State
University and all have their Ph.Ds in psychology. This article is great because it was written by
three psychologists and we can hear what they think about this situation. They say that the more
time spent IMing would relate to greater difficulty in concentrating on easy tasks such as
reading. The amount of time spent IMing is related to higher distraction rates while time spent
reading books was negatively correlated. This information is extremely useful and is very
reliable coming from three psychologists.
This article explains the effects IMing has on attention span and how distracting it
actually is. The article provides a lot of solid information about how IMing is bad for people
while working and also proves this by showing survey results.
Pashler, Harold, Sean H. K. Kang, and Renita Y. Ip. "Does Multitasking Impair Studying?
Depends on Timing." Applied Cognitive Psychology Appl. Cognit. Psychol. (2013): n.
pag. Web. 10 Oct. 2015.
The article Does Multitasking Impair Studying? Depends on Timing by Harold Pashler
talks about how multitasking gets in the way of important study time needed for class. People are
too distracted by their phones, social media and the internet that it is taking away precious time
that was initially set aside for studying. There has been a large advancement in technology over
the past few years that it is becoming an addiction to people. This is lowering school
performance and lowering attention span.
According to recent studies, the more people multitask, the worse they are at retaining
important information. Researchers ran three different experiments on the same people to show
the negative effects of multitasking while reading. These experiments showed how multitasking
lowers reading scores and how much it distracts people. Performance was lower while

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multitasking but when not multitasking, the students performance was much higher. This goes to
show how bad multitasking really is and people just simply should not do it.
This article was published in 2013 so it is fairly recent and very accurate. Although a lot
has changed over the last two years, this is still a great resource for my paper because it has a lot
of factual information from completed surveys of college students. This article will help me
prove my point and back up my argument because it talks a lot about how multitasking affects
studying which determines what score a person will earn on a test. This is probably one of my
strongest sources and it will be referred to a lot in my research paper.

Shao Dale and Shao Lawrence. The Effects Of Multitasking On Individuals Task
Performance. (2012) Web. 10 Oct. 2015.
Dale and Lawrence Shao talk about the effects multitasking has on individual
performance. They define the real definition of multitasking and explain what it means clearly.
Some people have different perceptions of the actual meaning of multitasking so this article
clears it up and provides information on the definition of multitasking
The article then talks about the different ways that multitasking affects accuracy, memory
and performance. This really has become a major problem because when people multitask, their
performance gets worse. The article was written just three years ago so it is fairly updated
and school performance in teens.
This article fits into my research topic perfectly because my topic is basically the title of
this article. There is a lot of information available for me to use throughout the article that will
definitely help me while writing. This is the best source that I have for my paper and I will rely
heavily on this article for a lot of helpful and useful information.