Why do college students engage in in-class media multitasking behaviours? A social learning perspective

People in modern society are media multitaskers due to portable devices and omnipresent wireless networks, and college students are no exception. Previous studies have indicated that students' media multitasking behaviours in class harm their academic performances, and understanding the reasons for college students' engagement in such behaviour is meaningful. However, the literature takes media multitasking behaviour as an audience behaviour, which ignores the interaction between students and their surroundings. This study fills this gap by emphasizing the role of the social learning process. A survey was conducted in a public and comprehensive university in western China, and a total of 457 valid respondents were obtained. The results from PLS-SEM revealed that college students' in-class media multitasking behaviours were influenced by both observational learning (ie, imitating others) and reinforcement learning (ie, in-class interventions), and this learning process was shaped by students' media multitasking self-efficacy and self-management of learning. These findings contribute to the current literature by providing a relatively new perspective for understanding college students' in-class media multitasking behaviours, and suggestions about how to deal with such behaviours are also provided.

Practitioner notes

What is already known about this topic

• In-class media multitasking behaviours (ICMMBs) damage college students' academic performance.
• College students' ICMMBs are affected by individual factors, such as internet addiction and sensation seeking.
• Social learning theory is widely adopted as a general theoretical background to explain those behaviours of which possible consequences are easily observed no matter from others or from individuals themselves.

What this paper adds

• This work enriches the media multitasking literature by investigating the predictors of ICMMBs from a relatively new perspective, that is, the social learning perspective.
• This work also contributes to the literature on media multitasking by examining how the social learning process of college students' ICMMBs differs across students.
• This work extends the application scope of social learning theory to the context of college students' ICMMBs.

Implications for practice and/or policy.

• The role of imitating others proves the importance of the learning atmosphere in classrooms, so teachers or lecturers should pay special attention to build a learning atmosphere away from ICMMBs.
• Some in-class interventions should be established, especially the formal policy of schools to require students to hand in their smartphones or other media before class and students' own mindfulness of such behaviour.
• Teachers or lecturers should take actions to lower the academic performance expectations of students with higher media multitasking self-efficacy (MMSE) because students with higher MMSE often overestimate their capabilities to have good performance when conducting other tasks simultaneously.