NPR – Anya Kamenetz
“Almost all college students have a cellphone. They use them an average of eight to 10 hours a day and check them an average of every 15 to 20 minutes while they’re awake. Heavier smartphone use has been linked to lower-quality sleep and lower GPAs — oh, are you getting a text right now? I’ll wait. Anyway, as I was saying, one professor at the University of Colorado Boulder has come up with a solution to smartphone distraction in one of his astronomy classes. “I was stunned how well it worked,” Doug Duncan wrote in an email to fellow astronomy professors, which he shared with NPR Ed. Duncan is part of a group at UC Boulder that works on applying learning research to improve teaching in science and engineering fields. He is the co-author of a paper showing that, at his college, more than 75 percent of undergrads reported texting while in class, and that in-class texting was linked to an average drop of half a letter grade in the course.”(more)