Digital distraction is a major source of frustration for professors. They’re split, however, on whether to do anything about it. Some believe the onus is on students to change their habits, while others see an overreliance on lecturing as at least part of the problem.

Those are among the findings of a new paper, co-written by Abraham E. Flanigan, a postdoctoral research associate in Ohio University’s school of communication, set to be presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association on Sunday.

In a different study, also scheduled to be presented at AERA, Flanigan and a co-author quantify the scope of the problem. Students in their sample at a large public university reported spending about a quarter of a typical class period in their least-favorite course using their devices for off-task purposes.

But the problem didn’t stop there. Students were digitally distracted in their favorite course for 12 percent of the class period. That finding, Flanigan said, was a sobering one. “If I were to know that my most motivated student was going to spend 12 percent of the class looking through her Twitter feed,” he said, “that kind of stinks, you know?”

Flanigan, who studies self-regulation, or the processes students use to achieve their learning goals, began researching digital distraction after confronting it in the classroom as a graduate instructor. The students he taught in a study-skills course “struggled mightily” with digital distraction, Flanigan said. In the years since, Flanigan has come to regard the siren call of the smartphone as something that wreaks havoc far beyond the classroom. Still, he thinks, there are ways that professors can help students ignore it.

Kids These Days?

In earlier research, Flanigan asked students about their experience with their devices. And he thinks they’re up against a different challenge than students in the past.

“Somebody might look at this research and say: This is really just research on people being distracted, and students have been distracted all throughout time,” he said. But today’s technology, Flanigan said, is an “ingrained societal phenomenon.” The experience of constantly monitoring a smartphone, he said, is different from feeling “contextually bored” and deciding to do a crossword puzzle.

In Flanigan’s study, students “described how digital distraction in the classroom stems from their habitual use of technology in pretty much every context of their life,” he said. “And that that doesn’t change when they enter the classroom.”

Just look around, Flanigan said. Texting during class undercuts students’ learning. Texting while driving can be deadly. But people do that, too.

Students, then, aren’t digitally distracted in class because they’re students. They’re digitally distracted in class because they happen to be in class.

Digital distraction tempts all of us, almost everywhere. That’s the premise of Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport, an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University.

A student who checks her phone in class, Newport said in an interview, isn’t much different from a parent who checks his phone while spending time with his kids, or a couple who each check their phones during a date. In each case, he said, someone feels a “compulsion” to do so, despite the recognition that “this is taking time away from things I really want to be doing.”

While the problem is not college-specific, Newport thinks higher ed can contribute to the solution. “The university,” he has written, “should be a citadel of concentration.” Professors, he said, can help students see the life of the mind as a key component of the good life, something worth protecting from the constant intrusion of social media.

Limiting Distraction

As the director the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University, Derek Bruff has a lot of conversations with professors about technology in the classroom. Many of them start like this: The professor has realized the extent to which students are distracted by their devices. The professor is upset. The professor has taken action, by banning laptops.

Bruff, whose next book, Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching, is set to be published this fall, is among the experts who think that’s a mistake. Why? Well, for one thing, he said, students are “going to have to graduate and get jobs and use laptops without being on Facebook all day.” The classroom should help prepare them for that.

Sometimes, Bruff said, professors treat laptops as if they are simply note-taking devices. But computers, Bruff said, can be used in many other ways, like working with data or a document collaboratively or finding information online, to enhance students’ learning.

On top of that, laptops provide accessibility for students with learning disabilities. A ban inhibits their learning; an exemption risks outing them to their classmates.

Bruff has also come to see professors’ reliance on a laptop ban as a clue. It can indicate, he said, that “the professor is just lecturing the entire way.” In those cases, Bruff said, students’ behavior is understandable. Sure, students get more out of a lecture when they really listen and take good notes. But even if they are distracted, he thinks they can very likely get enough out of a lecture. “You can probably watch the State of the Union and take good notes,” he said, “and also have a conversation with a friend.”

That’s why the best response to digital distraction is moving from a straight lecture format to active learning, said Steven Volk, an emeritus professor of history and co-director of the Great Lakes Colleges Association Consortium for Teaching and Learning.

When Volk teaches a course with 50 or 60 students, he said, “the idea is to keep them moving.”

Shifting the focal point away from the professor can help, too. “If they are in a small group with their colleagues,” Volk said, “very rarely will I see them on their laptops doing things they shouldn’t be.”

Flanigan has embraced a similar approach. He now lectures in blocks of 10 minutes or so before having students put their laptops away and engage in an activity, he said. And he also shares what the research says about digital distraction with students on the first day of class.

Paying Attention

Professors often focus on keeping distractions at bay. But that is the wrong approach, said James M. Lang, a professor of English and director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College, and a frequent contributor to The Chronicle. Attention is a prerequisite for learning. What instructors should consider, he said, is “what’s happening in the room when people are paying attention.”

Professors may not see themselves as performers, but if they can’t get students’ attention, nothing else they do matters. “Learning doesn’t happen without attention,” said Lang, who is writing a book about digital distraction, Teaching Distracted Minds.

In fact, Lang said, “you could argue that teaching is a form of getting people to pay attention to things that matter.” That’s what happens, for instance, when a literature professor points out a particular word in a poem.

It’s unrealistic to expect an instructor to hold every student’s attention for the entirety of every class period, Lang said. That’s why he suggests that faculty members focus on key times, like the first five minutes of class. The goal, he said, is to build a class period around a handful of those moments.

One aspect of distraction Lang plans to cover in his book is its history. It’s possible, he said, to regard our smartphones as either too similar or dissimilar from the distractions of the past. And it’s important, he said, to remember how new this technology really is, and how much we still don’t know about it.

Lang, for his part, is optimistic. More and more people, he said, are coming up with strategies to be more thoughtful about the way devices intrude on their lives. Lang himself has recently begun writing in hourlong blocks and only letting himself look at Twitter or email in the breaks between them. “We’re in a transitional period in all of this,” he said, “and I see more signs of hope than doom.”

Beckie Supiano writes about teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.