A New Generation of Digital Distraction

G eneration Z has arrived on college campuses, and is reshaping the debate about the use of digital devices in the classroom.

The new crop of traditional-aged students, which follows the millennials, includes those born roughly between 1995 and 2010. They have been dubbed “digital natives” for their comfort with — and addiction to — devices like smartphones. Many spent their high-school years pounding away on school-supplied Chromebooks.

For years, college professors have fallen into two camps: those who believe cellphones, laptops, and tablets should be allowed in class, to assist with instruction and to model responsible usage of the devices, and those who believe the devices should be banned, to eliminate distractions. But the latest generation of students, some experts say, are so wedded to their phones that flat-out bans may simply heighten students’ anxiety rather than help them focus.

Diversity in Academe: The Age Issue

Welcome to The Chronicle’s first special report devoted to age diversity on campuses. This annual issue also features compelling personal essays dealing with identity and disability — be sure to check them out.

• Reflections From a Millennial Teaching Millennials
• How to Rescue 17 Million Undergraduates a Year From Ageism
• Why I Attended Tribal College
• How a Classic Exercise Helps Students Understand Disability
• It Shouldn’t Be This Hard to Be On Campus

“I’m a Gen Xer, and if you ask me to turn off my device for a few hours, I don’t feel any sense of anxiety or loss,” says Corey Seemiller, an assistant professor of organizational leadership at Wright State University, and co-author of Generation Z Goes to College (Jossey-Bass, 2016). “But if you ask a young student to do that, they may do what you want externally and turn the device off, but internally they’re wishing they were somewhere else — seeing who is texting them back, or who’s on Snapchat.

“Is that what you want?”

Nevertheless, the addictiveness of the devices is leading an increasing number of professors who had formerly tolerated them to explore restrictions. Clay Shirky, an associate professor of arts at New York University, allowed devices until 2014, but then abruptly banned them when he realized too many of his students were mentally absent during class.

“It’s not about whether there’s a body in the classroom,” Mr. Shirky says. “It’s about whether there is a brain in the classroom. I’ll admit I’m not as interesting as Facebook. I’m stacking the deck.”

Colleges have generally stayed above the fray, allowing faculty members (many of whom spend committee meetings staring at their own devices) to set their own policies. Teaching centers at many institutions have issued short guides on the pluses and minuses of allowing devices.

The University of New Hampshire is among a shrinking group that sets “no devices” as the default, unless a professor makes an exception. In practice, many apparently do: Christen Palange, a 2017 graduate, says few instructors ever mentioned it. She learned of the policy during her sophomore year, when a professor began yelling after a student cracked open a laptop.

Ms. Palange says she was sometimes distracted during her college career by classmates using devices, and occasionally surfed the web herself during dull moments.

But she also recalls the benefits of having phones and laptops in class. Her laptop helped with note-taking: She would download lecture slides before class, and then annotate them as the professor spoke. When one professor mentioned a 1950s song that was unfamiliar to students, a classmate quickly found it on his phone and played it for the class. And during a class about weather, Ms. Palange and her classmates were able to track a coming storm in real time.

Bans miss the point, she argues: College is a time for students to begin taking personal responsibility for knowing when to set aside electronics and focus. “I don’t know of any job that my class will go into where we won’t be using a computer and have access to the internet,” she says.

Jeffrey W. McClurken, a history professor at the University of Mary Washington, allows students to use their phones and laptops, but only for classroom purposes. “All too often bans are more about classroom management rather than a pedagogical decision,” he says. “The world is changing incredibly fast. If we’re not preparing students to engage with these tools, then we’re doing them a disservice.”

For faculty members who don’t want devices in class, some experts advocate weaning students off them.

Larry D. Rosen, an emeritus professor of psychology at California State University-Dominguez Hills, suggests giving students a “tech break” for one minute to check and send messages. Instructors should initially schedule the breaks every 15 minutes, he says, but then gradually increase the time between breaks to teach students to focus.

In her own research, Ms. Seemiller, co-author of the book about Generation Z, has found that younger students are far more likely than older ones to send pictures during class, usually via apps like Instagram or Snapchat. Rather than try to stamp out such behavior, she brainstormed ways to incorporate it.

In one assignment in an organizational-leadership course, students had traditionally been asked to work with a partner and write down their personal strengths. Instead, Ms. Seemiller gave students 10 minutes to run around campus and use their phones to take a picture of something that illustrated their No. 1 strength. The students shared the photos with her via Dropbox. Later, each student got up to talk about his or her top strength as a slide show of the photos played in the background.

“I found it created a lot deeper reflection than just working with a partner,” Ms. Seemiller says.

M any instructors say they have reduced digital distraction by simply talking to students about the downsides of using devices.

Dozens of studies about devices in classrooms now exist. Among the findings: students stray off-task more than they think they do; device users fare slightly worse in classes than nonusers; and even those who use a laptop only for note-taking — with no off-task surfing or texting — perform less well than note-takers who write. (The theory is that students who write on paper are mentally processing the information, while laptop users are mindlessly transcribing.)

“The most important thing is that you explain to students” why devices can be harmful, says Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the author of Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Press, 2015). “Students are starting to catch on that the costs are greater than the rewards.”

Some professors say policies should vary based on the type of class — or even the type of student.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, says he bans devices in small seminars but encourages students to use them during large lectures.

“In a lecture hall with 300 students, if 20 students are playing Candy Crush it’s not going to make that big a difference,” he says. “But in a seminar, just one student playing can puncture the mood.”

And he notes that a ban might be more viable at the University of Virginia, with a large population of traditional-age students, than at an institution with many working adults. “If you tell a 35-year-old mother of two kids to turn a phone off in class, that’s pretty insulting,” he says. “She needs to know if the buses stop running, or if the babysitter can’t make it.”

Professors who favor bans must be prepared to accommodate students with disabilities. For instance, a student who has trouble focusing, perhaps due to attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, might receive an accommodation to use voice-recognition software to record a lecture.

“That’s one thing I haven’t had to work out,” says Hinda Mandell, an associate professor of communication at Rochester Institute of Technology, who bans devices from all of her classes and hasn’t yet encountered a student needing an accommodation. “Obviously, I’m not going to do something that’s against the law.”

Technological advances are hindering some old strategies for keeping students off their devices. The University of Chicago Law School shut off wireless internet access to most classrooms in 2008, and that policy is still on the books. But the block on Wi-Fi is less effective today, as students increasingly access the internet via data plans on their phones.

Thomas J. Miles, the school’s dean, admits the Wi-Fi block has become “moot,” but adds: “The policy still sends an important message to students that when we are in the classroom, it’s important to be focused on an intellectual discussion about law.”

What might become more common in the future is a ban on device bans. Among the reasons: concern about meeting the needs of disabled students; the growth in the number of students using digital textbooks, often for cost reasons; and university emergency plans that rely on contacting students through their cellphones.

At the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, it is “expected practice” that instructors not ban laptops, since a ban could discriminate against a student with disabilities, according to Donna Ellis, director of the university’s Centre for Teaching Excellence. Even if an exception were made for that student, the accommodation would inappropriately “out” the person, notes a web page maintained by the center.

That position “is probably where a lot of us will end up,” says Kevin Gannon, a history professor and director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Grand View University. “I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”

Mr. Gannon talks to students on the first day about how their use of devices can affect their own performance, and the experiences of students around them. But then he lets each class set its own policies on devices.

“I’ve been much more successful with that than with the usual ‘thou shalt nots,’” Mr. Gannon says. “I have not completely eliminated distractions, but I’m striking a balance between good classroom function and treating students as mature adults.”