In an attempt to further delineate the impact of interruptions Laura Bowman and her colleagues examined instant messages as a form of interruption during a learning task. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: a control group simply read a passage without interruptions, a first experimental group received IMs before reading the passage, and a second experimental group received IM interruptions while reading the passage. Upon completion of the task - reading only for the control group and reading plus IM conversations for the two experimental groups - all participants took a memory recall test. Bowman found that students took significantly longer to read the passage in the second experimental condition than in the IM first condition (and the shortest time was the read-only condition, of course); however, the students' test performance did not differ between all conditions suggesting that they may have consciously dealt with the interruption by spending additional time reading the material following the interruption.

So, what happens if someone is actually presented with multiple sources of information? Do they really attempt to take in both at the same time? This is highly doubtful. In actuality, they switch their focus from one task to the next and then, if necessary, back to the original task. In my research lab we are interested in how technology influences this task switching and have used a variety of research designs to capture the essence of task switching. In one survey-based study, for example, we found that certain tasks were done together less often than others including playing video games, reading books and texting. Following up that study with an experimental approach we interrupted students during a lecture by sending them text messages at critical points where the material on the screen was to be tested following the lecture. One third of the class did not receive any texts, one third were sent four texts during a 30-minute videotape lecture while the final group received 8 texts, designed to be maximally disruptive and cause extensive task switching. The initial findings were puzzling. The group who received 8 texts did significantly worse on the memory test, but those who got 4 texts did not. In addition, the 8-text group averaged only about 10% worse despite being inundated with our interruptive messages.

Trying to understand why our students were not severely hindered by our text messages, we noted the time that they received the messages and the time they chose to respond. We had instructed the students to respond to our messages but serendipitously we had not required them to answer immediately. Much to our surprise, those who chose to wait a couple of minutes to read the text message and to answer our text questions performed substantially better than those who responded immediately. In fact, the students who waited scored upwards of 90% on questions timed to coincide with their text message while those who jumped to immediately read and answer the text scored substantially lower, even below the mean of 70%. We repeated the study four times and found the same results. Those students who opted to avoid the knee jerk response strategy aced the test. So, what was driving them to delay immediate texting? What we believe is that those students had adopted a meta-cognitive strategy where they assessed the importance of material on the videotape and waited for less critical lecture material to answer our text.

Next, we wondered how people would fare in environments where they were supposed to focus on their work but were deluged by continual interruptions. Gloria Mark and her colleagues had previously observed computer programmers for three days, eight hours a day and noted every aspect of their behavior. Shockingly, they found that these programmers, who are faced with a task - computer programming - that requires continuous concentration, self interrupted on the average of every 3 minutes and that those interruptions were most often technological in nature. We decided to replicate Mark's work by observing typical middle school, high school and college students studying in their preferred study environment (most often in their home). Our trained observers monitored the students for 15 minutes noting every minute whether they were on-task or off-task and what potential distracters were available in their study area. Students were on-task only about 65% of the time and for the most part they had multiple technologies actively available in their field of view including a television, music, cell phone, and, of course, their computer. Interestingly, they showed a clear pattern of staying on task for about three minutes and then being distracted - most often by a technological interruption - only to return to their studying for another three minutes. When we looked at their school performance as well as how they expected to do on the material they were studying, we found, not surprisingly, that those were stayed on task more performed better. But that was not the only predictor of studying success. Three other predictors emerged - whether they had a clear strategy for studying the material, the amount of media that they consumed on an average day, and whether they checked Facebook at least once during the 15 minutes. No other individual tech activity had this negative impact, just a glance at their preferred social network.

What has emerged from this series of studies are parts of a larger puzzle. The central question has always been "Why do we multitask?" Now, I think, that question needs to become "Why do we choose to switch from one task to another?" and "Is task-switching always harmful to us?" These questions have broad applications to education, both in school and outside of the classroom environment. Since our students have learned from birth to pay attention sequentially to multiple media sources, what can we do to train them, or their brains, to make conscious decisions about when it is a bad idea to task switch and when task switching may not be as harmful?

Recently a parent asked me why we shouldn't just remove all technological distractions from the student's environment and only allow them to access the Internet, handle text messages, etc., until they completed studying. That seems, to me, like closing the barn door after the horses have all escaped and are prancing all over the fields. We gave our students a host of wonderful technologies and made them all portable and individualizable. We outfitted them with multimedia displays and customized them so that they would never miss an e-mail, text message, phone call or anything. We created a generation of learners who task switch every few minutes and do so because they are enticed by interruptive technologies. It is too late to change any of that and it is harmful to the relationships within the family to simply remove technologies from our children's study environments.