Simultaneously educating students about the impact of cell phone usage while creating a metric to predict their performance

The high usage of cell phones amongst students attending college appears to be impacting their attention spans and performance. Rather than admonishing students for the usage of cell phones in class, we explore a different approach. The intervention explored in this paper consists of assigning the students a recent article about the effect of cell phones on productivity and asking the students to complete a short reflection essay on this article. The study was conducted on 40 undergraduate students in a course on Assembly Language Programming in Fall 2017. The results of this intervention indicate that students are not aware of the recent research in the relationships between cell phone usage and productivity. A survey gauged the impact of this article on the students. Nearly 97% of the respondents reported that their awareness of the negative impact of cell phone usage on productivity increased. 78% of the respondents indicated that they were able to apply this awareness advantageously to become more productive in other courses. In addition to observing this positive change in student behavior, we computed a simple metric from the reflection essay submitted by the students. The metric, consisting of the word count of this essay had a correlation of 0.38 (p = 0.026) with the final grade for the course. This metric was computed within the first week of the course, and has reasonable predictive power to identify students who may need extra attention. This has the potential to improve student retention.