Does Multitasking Affect Students' Academic Performance? Evidence From a Longitudinal Study

Simon Amez, Stijn Baert, Emily Heydencamp and Joey Wuyts

No 982, GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO)

Abstract: Multitasking - alternating between two different tasks at the same time - has become a daily habit for many university students. However, this may come at a cost since the existing literature emphasises the negative association between multitasking and academic performance. Nonetheless, this literature is based on cross-sectional observational data so that that estimates cannot be given a causal interpretation. To complement these studies, we opted for a longitudinal design in this study. Specifically, for three consecutive years, students at two Belgian universities, in more than ten different study programmes, were surveyed on their multitasking preferences and academic performance. Then, these results were merged with the students' exam scores. We exploited the longitudinal character of the data by running random and fixed effect models. Our results indicate that the positive and negative aspects of multitasking with respect to academic performance cancel each other out.

Keywords: multitasking; academic performance; longitudinal data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/246594/1/GLO-DP-0982.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Does Multitasking Affect Students' Academic Performance? Evidence from a Longitudinal Study (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:glodps:982

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().