Category: Educational Psychology

 Having a healthy heart and lungs may be one of the most important factors for middle school students to make good grades in math and reading, according to findings presented at the American Psychological Association's 120th Annual Convention.

Understanding how a species battles to sustain itself in a challenging habitat is a cornerstone of ecological research; now scientists have applied this approach to science itself to discover why women are being driven out of academia. Their results, published in Oikos, reveals how a gender imbalance in science and academia is maintained by institutional barriers.

"In ecology a species can only establish itself and develop if the population exceeds a certain threshold," said Dr Katherine O'Brien from the University of Queensland, Australia. "It's similar for researchers and academics who need to reach a certain point before they can attract more funding, more students to teach and high quality collaborators which can increase their research productivity. Yet there are barriers which prevent women from reaching this point."

One of these barriers is the tendency of female academics towards part-time work in order to balance family and work commitments. Working part-time is rare in academia while university managers find it difficult to assess the research performance of part-time staff using traditional methods.

The performance of academics and researchers is increasingly assessed using set metrics such as the number of papers produced in a year or the number of citations the research generates. While these metrics can promote research output within an organization, they can also undermine diversity, which in ecological terms is fatal to a species as it underpins resilience.

"To use the ecology analogy, research productivity is similar to the birth rate of a new species. Both need to exceed a critical rate if the population is going to grow and survive, or the academic is to become established in their field," said O'Brien. "However, research metrics are strongly biased towards full-time continuous employment and penalize academics who take time off before they become established."

The ecological model also suggests that if women have children before becoming established they will struggle to remain competitive with their full-time peers. This explains drift of women from research into teaching, where performance is assessed on current rather than accumulated historical performance.

To address the gender imbalance the authors suggest that women who go part-time should be strategic and concentrate on either research of teaching. In turn university managers should be cautious in judging success using metrics, and implement schemes to ensure that part-time work and career breaks are not "one-way tickets" out of research.

"The ecological approach demonstrates that any system which operates on a narrow criteria, be it a forest or a faculty, undermines itself by reducing both diversity and the pool of talent from which our researchers are drawn," concluded O'Brien. "In a working environment dominated by those working full-time women need to be brave and be prepared to be the odd ones out.".

Most of us assume that confidence and certainty are preferred over uncertainty and bewilderment when it comes to learning complex information. But a new study led by Sidney D'Mello of the University of Notre Dame shows that confusion when learning can be beneficial if it is properly induced, effectively regulated and ultimately resolved.

The study will be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Learning and Instruction.

Notre Dame psychologist and computer scientist D'Mello, whose research areas include artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction and the learning sciences, together with Art Graesser of the University of Memphis, collaborated on the study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation.

They found that by strategically inducing confusion in a learning session on difficult conceptual topics, people actually learned more effectively and were able to apply their knowledge to new problems.

In a series of experiments, subjects learned scientific reasoning concepts through interactions with computer-animated agents playing the roles of a tutor and a peer learner. The animated agents and the subject engaged in interactive conversations where they collaboratively discussed the merits of sample research studies that were flawed in one critical aspect. For example, one hypothetical case study touted the merits of a diet pill, but was flawed because it did not include an appropriate control group. Confusion was induced by manipulating the information the subjects received so that the animated agents sometimes disagreed with each other and expressed contradictory or incorrect information. The agents then asked subjects to decide which opinion had more scientific merit, thereby putting the subject in the hot spot of having to make a decision with incomplete and sometimes contradictory information.

In addition to the confusion and uncertainty triggered by the contradictions, subjects who were confused scored higher on a difficult post-test and could more successfully identify flaws in new case studies.

"We have been investigating links between emotions and learning for almost a decade, and find that confusion can be beneficial to learning if appropriately regulated because it can cause learners to process the material more deeply in order to resolve their confusion," D'Mello says.

According to D'Mello, it is not advisable to intentionally confuse students who are struggling or induce confusion during high-stakes learning activities. Confusion interventions are best for higher-level learners who want to be challenged with difficult tasks, are willing to risk failure, and who manage negative emotions when they occur.

"It is also important that the students are productively instead of hopelessly confused. By productive confusion, we mean that the source of the confusion is closely linked to the content of the learning session, the student attempts to resolve their confusion, and the learning environment provides help when the student struggles. Furthermore, any misleading information in the form of confusion-induction techniques should be corrected over the course of the learning session, as was done in the present experiments."

According to D'Mello, the next step in this body of research is to apply these methods to some of the more traditional domains such as physics, where misconceptions are common.

NewsPsychology (June 13, 2012) — Each year in the United States about $135 billion is spent in training employees — but those billions do not always improve the workplace because the skills often do not transfer to the actual job.

“Learning is a way of life in organizations,” says Eduardo Salas, a psychological scientist from the University of Central Florida. “Everyone gets training. But what matters? What works? What influences learning and skill acquisition?”

In a new report published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Salas and co-authors conclude that when this money is well spent, “training and development activities allow organizations to adapt, compete, excel, innovate, produce, be safe, improve service and reach goals.”

One of the most important things that “matters,” the researchers found in their survey of the vast scientific literature on the science of training, is that human resource executives, chief learning officers and business leaders should view training as a whole system and not a one-time event. This means that what happens before and after the actual training is just as important as the training itself.

• Training is especially effective when various jobs in the organization have been analyzed, the skill sets of its employees are understood, supervisors and leaders are all on the same page and trainees are motivated to learn.
• During the training, whether it is computer and technology based or in a classroom, sufficient structure and guidance should be offered to trainees while still giving them opportunities to make decisions about their learning experience.
• After the training, trainees should have ample time and opportunities to use what they have learned in the real world with real feedback.

The individual characteristics that trainees bring to a learning environment are have been shown by psychological scientists to be important to consider.

• Trainees who believe that their abilities actually influence training outcomes are more likely to persist in learning activities, even when they encounter challenges.
• Trainees who are oriented toward mastery or learning may perform better when they can control how they explore and organize training material
• Ttrainees who are oriented toward performance seem to do better in highly structured environments that involve successively more complex tasks.

The broader psychological science of learning can also inform effective training programs. Research shows that a gap exists between performance in training and the integration of newly learned skills on the job. But that gap can be narrowed through the application of various empirically tested insights into learning.

• Repeating tasks within increasingly complicated contexts helps to ensure that learning lasts over time.
• Encountering errors during training helps to prepare trainees for real-life situations as they are required to apply concepts learned in training.
• Watching someone else perform certain skills can also contribute to learning, a concept scientists refer to as behavioral role modeling.

Despite the wealth of practical and scientific research in this field, as Paul W Thayer, professor of psychology from North Carolina State University in Raleigh points out in his commentary accompanying the article, “There is still a tendency in business, government, and academia to adopt programs based on little more than attractiveness, modishness, or a desire to keep up with others in the field.”

Salas and his colleagues have tips for policymakers, too, who may need to assess skills across an entire country or geographic region, and whose goals are more likely to include skills that are relevant to many jobs to ease employee transfers. Establishing a well-prepared labor pool can help to attract businesses, provide jobs, and increase competitiveness in a given area or industry. With this in mind, the authors emphasize that “government should not be promoting or investing in training efforts that fail to incorporate the principles of good training.” Policymakers can use the best practices of training evaluation to scrutinize funded training programs for inefficiencies and determine whether those programs still merit funding.

Before embarking on a training program, organizers should always ask a series of questions. What training strategy will be employed? What are we doing to ensure that we adequately engage, motivate and challenge the trainees? What are we going to do before and after this training to ensure trainees can and will use what they have learned?

“The take home message is that organizations who invest in training need to be informed by the science,” Salas says.

The new report, “The Science of Training and Development in Organizations: What Matters in Practice,” is co-authored by Scott Tannenbaum of The Group for Organizational Effectiveness, Kurt Kraiger of Colorado State University, and Kimberly Smith-Jentsch of the University of Central Florida.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Association for Psychological Science.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. E. Salas, S. I. Tannenbaum, K. Kraiger, K. A. Smith-Jentsch. The Science of Training and Development in Organizations: What Matters in Practice. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 2012; 13 (2): 74 DOI: 10.1177/1529100612436661

A pair of new studies by computer scientists, biologists, and cognitive psychologists at Harvard, Northwestern, Wellesley, and Tufts suggest that collaborative touch-screen games have value beyond just play.

Two games, developed with the goal of teaching important evolutionary concepts, were tested on families in a busy museum environment and on pairs of college students. In both cases, the educational games succeeded at making the process of learning difficult material engaging and collaborative.

The findings were presented at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) conference in May.

The games take advantage of the multi-touch-screen tabletop, which is essentially a desk-sized tablet computer. In a classroom or a museum, several users can gather around the table and use it simultaneously, either working on independent problems in the same space, or collaborating on a single project. The table accommodates multiple users and can also interact with physical objects like cards or blocks that are placed onto its surface.

The new research moves beyond the novelty of the system, however, and investigates the actual learning outcomes of educational games in both formal and informal settings.

"Do we know what the users are actually learning from this? That question is a step beyond the research of the past 10 years, where we've been seeing research publications that assess how well the system is performing, but not addressing how well it's accomplishing what it's really designed for," says principal investigator Chia Shen, a Senior Research Fellow in Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Director of the Scientists' Discovery Room Lab.

The two collaborative games that have been developed for the system, Phylo-Genie and Build-a-Tree, are designed to help people understand phylogeny — specifically, the tree diagrams that evolutionary biologists use to indicate the evolutionary history of related species. Learners new to the discipline sometimes think of evolution as a linear progression, from the simple to the complex, with humans as the end point.

"What people are used to typically is geospatial data, like a map," explains Shen. "In phylogeny, however, the students need to understand that the relationship between species really depends on when they diverged. That's represented by the position of the internal nodes of the tree, not by counting across the top of the tree, which is how many people intuitively do it."

The Phylo-Genie game, developed by researchers at Harvard, Wellesley, and Tufts, attempts to address the misconceptions that students hold even at the college level. Designed for a formal classroom setting, the game walks students through a scenario in which they have been bitten by an unusual species of snake and must identify its closest relatives in order to choose the correct anti-venom.

The researchers tested Phylo-Genie on pairs of undergraduate students who had not yet taken a course in evolutionary biology. Other pairs of students were given the same exercise, but in a pen-and-paper format. In comparison to the paper version, the electronic game produced statistically significantly higher scores on a post-test (an exam borrowed from a Harvard course), as well as higher participant ratings for engagement and collaboration.

Both of the phylogeny games were designed and evaluated in accordance with accepted principles of cognitive psychology and learning sciences.

The Build-a-Tree game was designed with an informal museum environment in mind. Researchers on this project, directed by lead author Michael S. Horn at Northwestern University and Shen at Harvard, observed 80 families and other social groups interacting with the Build-a-Tree game at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

The game asks users to construct phylogenetic trees by dragging icons — for example, a bat, a bird, and a butterfly — toward one another in the correct order. As the user progresses through several levels, the problems become more challenging.

The idea, Shen says, is to encourage what museum science educators call "active prolonged engagement," as opposed to "planned discovery." The former allows learners to explore information independently and to interact with it in an open-ended manner; the latter approach, common in natural history museums, guides the user toward a particular set of facts.

"Natural history museums have always been a place where the exhibits are behind glass in the gallery," explains Shen. "You come here to see things that you just don't see anywhere else — fossils millions of years old — and you come here to learn. You see school groups and parents coming in with a serious mind, and we're breaking into that culture."

The Build-a-Tree game performed well against established measures of active prolonged engagement and social learning.

Even in the most high-tech exhibit hall, where visitors are engaged at every turn, it takes a great deal of creative thinking to demonstrate a phenomenon that is essentially imperceptible in real time.

"Evolution is a process that takes millions of years, whereas in chemistry or physics there are all sorts of phenomena that you can experiment with, like the tornado exhibit where you can go in and interrupt the air," says Shen. "This is our experiment: can we build something that is not as phenomenon-driven but can still engage them? I think we've succeeded in that."

The work on Build-a-Tree was supported by the National Science Foundation, with research evaluation conducted in the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Horn (lead author) and Shen worked with Zeina Atrash Leong (Northwestern University), Florian Block (a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS), Judy Diamond (University of Nebraska State Museum), E. Margaret Evans (University of Michigan), and Brenda Phillips (a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS).

The work on Phylo-Genie was supported by the Encyclopedia of Life Learning and Education group and by the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. Shen's collaborators were lead author Bertrand Schneider (a graduate student at Stanford University, who completed the work as a visiting student at Harvard), Megan Strait (Tufts University), Laurence Muller (a visiting student at Harvard), Sarah Elfenbein (a recent Wellesley graduate, now at Yale University), and Orit Shaer (Wellesley College).

Discipline-based education research (DBER) has generated insights that could help improve undergraduate education in science and engineering, but these findings have not yet prompted widespread changes in teaching practice, says a new report from the National Research Council.Science and engineering faculty, institutions, disciplinary societies, and professional societies should all support high-quality DBER and the adoption of the evidence-based teaching strategies that have emerged from it, the report says.

DBER is a collection of related research fields that investigate how students learn in particular scientific disciplines and identify ways to improve instruction. This research is emerging in many scientific disciplines, including physics, chemistry, biology, the geosciences, and astronomy, as well as in engineering.A DBER scholar in physics, for example, might investigate how students learn concepts such as force or acceleration and try to identify effective ways for instructors to teach these concepts.

Scholars in all DBER fields share the goal of improving teaching and learning by using findings from empirical research.Although they have made inroads in terms of establishing their fields, the report says, these scholars still face challenges in identifying pathways for training and professional recognition. And findings from DBER have not yet led to widespread change in the teaching of undergraduate science and engineering.

Notable research findings from DBER on undergraduate teaching and learning include:

• Student-centered learning strategies can enhance learning more than traditional lectures. Examples of effective, research-based approaches are making lectures more interactive, having students work in groups, and incorporating authentic problems and activities.
• Students have incorrect understandings about fundamental concepts — particularly phenomena that are not directly observable, such as those that involve very large or very small scales of time and space. For example, students often have difficulty understanding processes that involve deep time, such as Earth's history or natural selection, and many learning challenges in chemistry result from students' difficulties in comprehending that matter is made up of discrete particles.DBER has identified instructional techniques that may help, like using "bridging analogies" that link students' correct understandings and the situation about which they harbor a misconception.
• Students are challenged by important aspects of the domain that can seem easy or obvious to experts. For instance, in problem solving students tend to focus on the superficial aspects of a problem rather than its deep structure.Students in all disciplines also have trouble understanding representations like graphs, models, and simulations. These challenges pose serious impediments to learning in science and engineering, especially if instructors are not aware of them.Several strategies appear to improve problem-solving skills, such as providing support and prompts — known as "scaffolding" — as students work their way through problems.

Institutions, disciplinary societies, and professional societies should support faculty efforts to use evidence-based teaching strategies in their classrooms. In addition, they should work together to prepare future faculty who understand research findings on learning and teaching and who value effective teaching as part of their career aspirations.And they should support venues for DBER scholars to share their research findings at meetings and in high-quality journals.

Future directions for DBER investigations should include research that explores similarities and differences in learning among various student populations; longitudinal studies that can shed light on how students acquire and retain understanding (or misunderstanding) of concepts; studies that investigate student outcomes other than test scores; and studies of organizational and behavior change that could aid the translation of DBER findings into practice.

Summer internships are beginning, and career-related research from Kansas State University is helping determine what can make those internships more meaningful for students.

Kerri Day Keller, director of career and employment services and a doctoral student in special education, counseling and student affairs, has studied internships as high-impact educational practices and identified eight themes that characterize effective internships.

"Students, employers and universities all have certain interests and outcomes they value from internships," Keller said. "I wanted to be able to look at some of these interests that affect students and I didn't want to lose the focus on the internship as a student-learning experience. I feel strongly that an internship should be a learning experience and not just a job."

Keller studied how internships are high-impact educational practices that can lead to higher levels of learning than those practices found in traditional classroom settings. Other high-impact educational practices include undergraduate research, first-year experiences, service learning and other activities. Very little research has looked at internships as high-impact practices, Keller said.

Keller researched two aspects of effective internships: the essence of internships done well and the outcomes of internships done well. Through a qualitative study with 29 students, employers and faculty members, Keller identified eight important themes: four themes related to the essence of internships and four themes related to the outcome of internships.

According to the four themes related to essence, effective internships: require commitment, connect the classroom to career, facilitate good communication and provide a sense of community.

"We often think about the importance of an intern's supervisor, but I also found that interns who had a good experience also talked about the co-workers and the other people involved in their internship," Keller said. "Students said that it was really important for them to feel welcome and to feel a valued part of the organization and not just 'the intern.'"

According to the four themes related to outcome, effective internships: develop competencies, produce crystallization, generate capital and build confidence.

"Crystallization involves deciding whether this is the career path for you and discovering more about your career interests," Keller said. "Generating capital also involves more than making money — it can also refer to 'social capital,' which involves networking and connections made through an internship, or it can relate to 'symbolic capital,' which is essentially having the internship on your resume."

Keller's research has several implications for students, employers and universities. Her study shows that in order to create successful internships, it is important to prepare students, educate employers and carefully scale up programs at universities. Keller noted that it is especially important for students to show initiative, be self-directed and have strong communication and interpersonal skills.

"I think the university has a critical role in continuing our preparation of students," Keller said. "This is also applicable to what we are doing in career and employment services and I think it reminds us that we can continue taking an active role in educating employers about what creates a positive internship experience."

Keller's qualitative study involved interviews with 19 students who had an academic credit-bearing internship, whether paid or unpaid. To understand what the participants brought back to the classroom, Keller also interviewed five employers of interns as well as five faculty members who taught internship participants.

She interviewed students and faculty from a variety of disciplines, including horticulture, animal science, political science, mass communications, interior design and hotel and restaurant management. The employers she interviewed came from both for-profit and nonprofit organizations.

Keller would like to further research the area of unpaid and paid internships, as well as take a closer look at effective internships that were not for academic credit.

The No Child Left Behind Act has bolstered language test scores but done little to improve math and reading scores for students in rural Alabama schools, according to a new study by Auburn University and RTI International.

The study, published in the June issue of Regional and Sectoral Economic Studies, used eight years of county-level data to assess the effects of No Child Left Behind on student performance in Alabama's rural schools.

Reading and math proficiency for all students is one of the primary goals of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which requires states to measure student progress by conducting annual assessments. Based on the results, schools are held accountable for making adequate yearly progress toward the act's goals and receive rewards or sanctions based on their status.

The research team found that while changes to the state's school accountability system associated with No Child Left Behind had a positive effect on eighth grade test scores for language and for test score gains in language between the fourth and eighth grades, the measured effects on test scores for reading and math are mostly zero or negative.

"The results suggest that the act failed in its major objective, which was to enhance students' proficiency in math and reading," said Yuqing Zheng, Ph.D., a research economist at RTI and one of the study's co-authors.

To determine the impact of No Child Left Behind, the researchers focused on Stanford Achievement Test scores from fourth and eighth grade students in Alabama's 67 county school systems between 1999 and 2007. The scores were averages taken from all public schools in each county, exclusive of city schools.

The study found that No Child Left Behind is associated with a statewide increase in test score level for language of 3.2 percent as well as statewide declines in average reading and math test score levels of 2.6 percent and 0.6 percent, respectively. The study focused on Alabama county schools because minorities and the economically disadvantaged — a main target of the legislation — are well represented in those districts.

"Though the findings themselves cannot be directly extended to other states, the methodology has some unique aspects, including an elegant method for accounting for the adequate yearly progress provision in the mandate," Zheng said.

The researchers also identified several variables that had a strong impact on student performance including district size, the percentage of families living in poverty, median family income and teacher pay.

"Teacher pay is a key variable affecting test scores in our model," said Zheng. "While per pupil spending increased during this time, unfortunately, teacher pay declined by 11.4 percent in real terms between the pre- and post-No Child Left Behind periods, and thus had no effect on test scores according to our results."

Remember that teacher you grumbled about back in your school days, the really tough one who made you work so hard, insisted you could do better, and made you sweat for your A's? The one you didn't appreciate until after you graduated and realized how much you had learned?

Minority students in the U.S. might have fewer of those teachers, at least compared to white students, and as a result they might be at a significant learning disadvantage.

A major study, led by Rutgers-Newark psychology professor Kent D. Harber, indicates that public school teachers under-challenge minority students by providing them more positive feedback than they give to white students, for work of equal merit. The study, which is currently available online in the Journal of Educational Psychology (JEP), involved 113 white middle school and high school teachers in two public school districts located in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut tri-state area, one middle class and white, and the other more working class and racially mixed.

Teachers read and commented on a poorly written essay which they believed was composed by a student in a writing class. Some teachers thought the student was black, some thought the student was Latino, and some thought that the student was white. Teachers believed that their feedback would be sent directly to the student, in order to see how the student would benefit from their comments and advice.

In fact, there was no actual student, and the poorly written essay was developed by Harber and his team. The real purpose was to see how teachers would respond to subpar work due to the race of the student who composed it. As Harber and his team predicted, the teachers displayed a "positive feedback bias," providing more praise and less criticism if they thought the essay was written by a minority student than by a white student.

An important aspect of the positive bias was that it depended on how much social support teachers received from their fellow teachers and administrators — but only if the student was black. In This case, teachers lacking social support showed the positive bias, while those who enjoyed support did not show the bias. Teachers who thought the student was Latino showed the bias, regardless of their school-based social support.

"The social implications of these results are important; many minority students might not be getting input from instructors that stimulates intellectual growth and fosters achievement," notes Harber. "Some education scholars believe that minorities under-perform because they are insufficiently challenged — the 'bigotry of lowered expectations,' in popular parlance," he explains. "The JEP study indicates one important way that this insufficient challenge might occur: in positively biased feedback," according to Harber.

Harber believes that the positive feedback bias might help explain the stubborn academic performance gap between minority students and white students, an enduring social problem that threatens to "reverse social successes won through legislation, jurisprudence, and changing cultural attitudes" toward minorities. Previous attempts to address the performance gap have, correctly, examined inequalities in school funding, racism, and distrust of academia in some minority communities, notes the report.

The current study suggests that the performance gap might also be due to a cause that has received relatively little attention: the nature of instructional feedback from white teachers to minority students.

Harber believes the study's findings have implications not only for educational systems in the U.S. but also for businesses and in fact any organization where performance appraisals and feedback are crucial tools for training and development.

The study builds on and expands Harber's previous demonstrations of the positive feedback bias, involving college students in 1998 and in 2004, and teacher trainees in 2010. His partners on this latest study are: Jamie L. Gorman and Frank P. Gengaro, Rutgers University, Newark; Samantha Butisingh and William Tsang, Rutgers University, New Brunswick; and Rebecca Ouellette, Fairleigh Dickinson University.

Harber and his team believe their findings could have broad implications for teachers, parents and students, and business leaders. He is available to explain in detail how the research was conducted, who was involved, the analysis and outcomes.

A small minority of today's university students don't use email and others are confused by the array of technologies available at universities. Yet many students couldn't bear to be without their mobile phones and find themselves distracted by social networking sites during study.

These are the some of the findings from research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) into how today's generation of students use technology. The research, led by Dr Christopher Jones of the Open University, surveyed and interviewed over two thousand first year students at five English universities.

"Our research shows that the argument that there is a generational break between today's generation of young people who are immersed in new technologies and older generations who are less familiar with technology is flawed," says Dr Jones. "The diverse ways that young people use technology today shows the argument is too simplistic and that a new single generation, often called the 'net generation', with high skill levels in technology does not exist."

There was little difference in the reported IT skill levels between the sexes, except male students were more confident than female students in their use of spreadsheets, graphics, audio/video, computer maintenance and security. But university staff noted that while students had a wide exposure to technology, they often lacked an in-depth knowledge of specialised pieces of software.

The research findings included that almost all (97.8 per cent) had a mobile phone, just over three quarters (77.4 per cent) owned a laptop and over a third (38.1 per cent) owned a desktop computer. Over two thirds (70.1 per cent) felt their access to computers was sufficient to meet their computing needs, and the mobile phone was chosen by 83.2 per cent as the device students would miss most if they did not have access to it.

However, the surveys also revealed a small minority of students who either didn't use email or have access to mobile phones. For example, students who were 20 years old or younger reported being more engaged in instant messaging, texting, participating in social networks, downloading or streaming TV or video and uploading images than students who were aged 25 years or more.

In another example, only 4.3 per cent of those aged 20 or younger never used social networking websites compared to 78.5 per cent of those aged 35 years or older. The younger students also used information and communication technologies for social life and leisure more often while older students were more likely to use them for study purposes.

In their studies, students used these new technologies more than they were required to by their course. This was particularly marked for instant messaging and social networks. However, certain new technologies were only used by a minority of students regardless of their age: contributing to blogs (21.5 per cent) and wikis (12.1 per cent) or using a virtual world (2 per cent).

Despite mobile devices and broadband enabling students to study anywhere, they still inhabit the same kinds of learning spaces they used ten years ago. They continue to study in their bedrooms, the university library or other dedicated study spaces.

The distracting nature of technologies was commonly cited in the interviews but also happily accepted. Most students had developed ways to cope with the distractions while studying. These ranged from switching off the sources of distraction to taking breaks for social networking.

There was little evidence that today's students enter university with demands for new technologies that teachers and universities cannot meet. Several students reported initial surprise or confusion at the array of technologies that were available at their university, but few thought that this led to long-term difficulties. Teachers who are prepared to develop their own skills with these new technologies and integrate them carefully into their courses are unlikely to be held back by a preceding generation.