EFFECTS OF PAUSING AND TASK RELEVANCE ON ONLINE LEARNING, A MEDIA MULTITASKING STUDY

Abstract

The shift to online learning amidst the COVID-19 pandemic created a host of new challenges. One of which involves students’ rising media multitasking (MMT) habits while engaging online academic content. Few studies have investigated the learning implications of newer forms asynchronous video lecture consumption in context of concurrent and sequential MMT behaviours, such as social media scrolling. The current study investigates the impact of media-based secondary tasks under conditions of pausing (pause and no-pause) and task-relevance (relevant and non-relevant) on academic performance during a pre-recorded psychology lecture video. In addition, two separate Media Multitasking Indexes (MMI) assessing students’ general MMT and online lecture MMT habits were compared to each other, and to academic performance. To our surprise no-pause conditions did not demonstrate an academic performance cost when compared to both the control and pause conditions, and the relevant pause condition demonstrated an academic enhancement effect. However, academic performance costs were found for no-pause groups when academic performance was narrowed to content that overlapped with the six MMT distractors. Moderate positive correlations were revealed between both MMI’s. Both indexes demonstrated similar correlations to academic performance across all conditions. However, further speculation reveals the control scores may be deflated as a result of “non-compliant” participants paradoxically engaging in a higher volume of non-study-related MMT behaviours during the uninterrupted lecture than participants in the experimental conditions. Future online MMT studies need to enforce novel methods to prevent or control for non-study-related MMT during the study.