Even though smartphones can be used in very productive and useful ways, a new study reveals that these tech miracles are actually working the other way around in the case of some students. Smartphones can be our best friends, but you know how things go with friendships: they’re extremely unstable.
A new study done at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and published in the journal Educational Psychology is revealing the dark side of our precious smartphones.
Lower exam scores indicate higher smartphone usage
The outcome of the study is that students who receive higher homework but lower exam scores were more likely to look for the right answers by using the internet or another source. Coming up with the answer themselves didn’t seem like a suitable option.
Lead author Arnold Glass, who’s also a professor of psychology at Rutgers-New Brunswick’s School of Arts and Sciences, declared:
When a student does homework by looking up the answers, they usually find the correct answer, resulting in a high score on the assignment,
He also added:
However, when students do that, they rapidly forget both the question and answer. Consequently, they transform homework from what has been, until now, a useful exercise into a meaningless ritual that does not help in preparing for exams.
The study included an amount of 2,433 Rutgers-New Brunswick students over 11 different lecture courses, which means that it’s pretty reliable.
At the moment, over 3 billion people across the world use a smartphone, which means over a third of the planet’s population. While nobody contradicts the efficiency of these little gadgets as long as they are used for good purposes, addiction is another concerning topic. A Common Sense Media Report from 2016 reveals that 50 percent of teenagers declare themselves addicted to mobile devices, so there’s no wonder how some of them are using smartphones for not-so-orthodox actions such as searching for exam answers online.
