Report | myple

The Main Distractors of the Students of Our Group

INTRODUCTION

All of us, many times, were distracted with something. Sometimes did not happen nothing with these distractions, but others did. One of these consequences is that some students have bad notes, they do less things than all they can do if they put all their concentration. In this work, we will try to know which are the main distractions to the students of our group (the group 607 of the ENP 2, 2014-2015), and then try to find a way to help them.

JUSTIFICATION

As we said it, there are many different things that can distract to persons, especially students, of their goals, like do homework, study, work, etc. We know that this is a very important problem to solve, more because we are finishing the high school and we must have a very good average to can entrance to the career that we want. So, we will try to find the main distractors to can help them to beat the situation to can obtain better notes, or at least can know of its existence.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

The students from Latin America have a lot of academic problems, they usually have a low academic level, this is because different factors, like the distance between the school and home, economy factors and of course the distractions during the classes. The distractions can be from different sources like, emotional problems, bulling, social networks, technologies, etc.

The technologies and social networks have a lot of advantages, for example, the ICT’s (Information and Communication Technologies) can be very useful for the new generations of Scientifics, because they use it for making easier the work and the communication between them. But also the technology has disadvantages.

Most of the students populating classrooms in today’s universities and colleges were born in 1982 or later and are the first university cohort to be so constantly wired and connected to friends, to the media and to the Internet through cell phones, MP3 players and laptops. With so much opportunity to check their email, text their friends, visit Facebook or surf the web, it is not surprising, therefore, that many of these students are distracted during class.

However, while technology may be the cause of much of the distraction in university and college classrooms, it also presents pedagogical opportunities to enhance the learning experience and, more specifically, student engagement. Students become engaged when their academic experience is characterized by meaningful educational activities, including active learning, involvement in enriching educational experiences, seeking guidance from staff or working collaboratively with other students (Lennox Terrion and Aceti, 2012).

Kubey et al. discuss that excessive Internet users usually stay up late, get less sleep, feel tired and have impaired academic performance. In addition, Ceyhan’s findings indicate that PIU levels of the Turkish university students who use the Internet mostly at night are notably higher than those of the students who use it in daytime. However, the Internet activities of the Turkish students who use it at night have not been sufficiently investigated (Tekinarslan and Gürer, 2011)

The Internet and the technologies are not the only distractors that affect to students, also the attitude of the teacher to students determine if they pay attention in the class. Usually the teachers of university and high-school have a very high level of knowledge and experiences but sometimes they don’t know how teach to a group of students. An important issue in education is the inclusion of students with disabilities with their non-disabled peers in settings that resemble as closely as possible the general educational program, while also meeting their special needs.

One of the most significant determinants of inclusion success is the teacher’s attitudes toward inclusion. Teachers who report having support expressed more positive attitudes toward inclusion. But to succeed teachers report the need for additional planning time, training, and specialized instructional materials, which may be seen as contextual factors in the students’ environment.

Previous research has established a strong connection exists between teacher-directed instructions and student achievement and learning behavior in regular classroom settings. In most regular classrooms teachers probably gives short instructions many time every day, telling the students what to do or presenting information about a thing, event, or phenomena. For students at risk instructions are a contextual factor that probably have a great impact on their’ ability to be active and participate.

In regular school classroom, the focus of the conversation is mostly directed by the teacher and is be full of information about subjects and things that the student may have had no prior direct experience of. The development of the ability to use symbols is a central and fundamental ability for more complex human cognitive development and one of the keys for understanding human behavior (Billinger, 2011)

In a class the teacher has to use dynamism for the students can get the most information and understa,nd the topic and the concepts. The examples are part of a good class because, these permit to students relate concepts with the context of the real life.

When the teacher introduces a new concept to the students, a concept some students may not have any prior experience of, the teacher likely gives short instructions to help the students understand the meaning of the concept. The teacher may give just a few examples of situations how the concept is used and can be used, a scenario that is probably frequent in regular classrooms. If the students cannot easily use the information in the teacher instruction, beyond the few examples the teacher presented, then the students will likely be less able to be active in the learning activity. If, however, the teacher presents the information such that the students easily could act on never before experienced stimuli relations within the information (symbolic behavior), then the students likely would have greater opportunities to be active during class (Billinger, 2011).

Finally the emotional problem is one of the biggest problems in attention of students because this provoques that they think in other things during the class.

During social interaction we often have to assimilate multiple pieces of incoming information in any given moment. To achieve this we use attention systems to filter relevant from irrelevant information, and working memory (WM) to monitor, update, and integrate ongoing current events. This enables us to forecast others’ intentions and plan one’s own behavior fluently and efficiently. Social encounters are often rich with emotion. The presence of emotion during attention and WM tasks has been shown tostrongly influence how we in turn perceive and process a situation, and there is evidence that particular emotions can both facilitate and impair performance, depending on the task at hand. Numerous studies report that attention is rapidly oriented and biased toward faces displaying fear or anger and toward threatening words and scenes (Jackson, Linden and Raymond, 2012).

PROPOSED SOLUTION / OBJECTIVES

To can know which are the main distractions of our school group for then try to find a way to help them to know about the problematic and its consequences. For this, we will try to give them some talks, where we’ll tell them information about the problem that we try to solve, but all this process will be at the “Methodology” zone.

METHODOLOGY

The first thing that we did was take information about other persons that also wants to do something with this kind of problems; all the information was showed in the “Theoretical Framework” zone. Well, once we knew that, we decided to make a virtual questionnaire in Google Drive, a very good tool that helped us to can organize the information better. In this document, we ask about the age, the genre and questions about what they think are their main distractors. We did some graphics to can organize the information better. All the information will be showed in the part of the results.

Now, with all the data, we though how to talk with them to can help them to know about this problem and their conduct. Finally, we started to talk with many of classmates and friends, showing them the general results that we got, with the idea that they could make conscience and change their bad habits. In all these talks we said things like the bad internet and technology use, we highlighted how many times we waste time in our social webs, cellphones and own things. We also highlighted the importance of give all our attention in one activity, as this way we (based in the references) can make better things, we redact, think, resolve, work and study better. We must organize all our activities to can obtain the goals that we want. The desire and the dedication are a very good combination.

RESULTS

In this section you can see the results of the questionnaires that we did.

ANALYSIS OF THE RESULTS

As you can see in the information that we got in the questionnaires, the main distraction of our group is the cellphone (35 students), following by friends (10 students) and the imagination (6 students). So, we tried to talk more about the cellphone effects in students like us. Also, another of topics that we boarded, was all the time that we waste in our distractions, and how much we will do if we spend this time un productive things, like homework or studying to can iprove or average, which is very important for us this year.

CONCLUSIONS

We conclude that the distractors are a very serious problem that we must solve if we want to have better notes, all of these kinds of things waste much time that we could use to improve our abilities and knowledge. So, the point of our project is to make you see that you have your own distractors and that is your responsibility find it and eradicated it. We helped some classmates, talking with them, but if you want you can talk with us too.

REFERENCES

Tekinarslan, E., Gürer, M. D. (2011). Problematic Internet use among Turkish university students: A multidimensional investigation based on demographics and Internet activities. International Journal of Human Sciences [Online]. 8:1. Available: http://www.InsanBilimleri.com/En.
Lennox Terriona, J. & Aceti, V. (2012). Perceptions of the effects of clicker technology on student learning and engagement: a study of freshmen Chemistry students. Learning Technology. 20(16150). 1-11 doi: 10.3402/rlt.v20i0.16150.
Jackon, M. C., Linden, D. E. J. & Raymond, J. E. (2012) “Distracters” do not always distract: visual working memory for angry faces in enhanced by incidental emotional words. Frontiers in Psychology. 3(437), 1-9. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00437.
Miendlarzewka, E. A., van Elswijk, G., Cannistraci, C. V. & van Ee, R. (2013) Working memory load attenuateds emotional enhancement in recognition memory. Frontiers in Psychology. 4(112), 1-10. doi:10.3389/psyg.2013.00112.
Billinger, S. (2012) Distraction of symbolic behavior in regular classrooms. Frontiers in Psichology. 3(521), 1-7. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00521.
Heim, S., benasich, A. A. & Keil, A. (2013) Distraction by emotion in early adolescence: affective facilitation and interference during the attentional blink. Frontiers in Psichology. 4(580), 1-10. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00580.