How Does Technology Affect Teens Ability To Learn?

Ava Stills, Autumn Ford, Analise Gates

Question and Hypothesis:
For our project we used the question does texting during class affect the
concentration of both students and staff at Animas High School? Our hypothesis for this
project was if someone is texting while in class it will cause a distraction and prevented
learning from both the students and teachers, because it distracts not only the one who
is texting but others it has created a large problem in school, including AHS.
Abstract:
In this project, we posed the question does texting during class affect the
concentration of both students and staff at Animas High school?. We began our project
by doing research about how teens are affected by texted. After collecting all of the
information, we constructed a survey of made of questions concerning how teens are
affected by texting in class. After collecting all of the data for the survey, we put our
results on spreadsheets and came to our conclusion. The results showed us that teens
are indeed affected in ways by texting in class. Majority of the subjects said that they
are texting either by them texting or their peers texting. We had a great time with this
project and learning how teens are affected by technology was very interesting.

Introduction:
As teenagers in this day in age, our lives revolve around technology. We are
asking the question how does technology affect a teens ability to learn and how does
texting specifically affect teens learning. This topic is not only something that we
witness, but as teens we feel the effects of texting in class about everyday. We decided
to do this project because it was a topic that we have a lot of background knowledge.
We already knew that there are a lot of studies that show texting affects teens sleep,
learning ability and social skills. We decided to send out a survey to 40 students and 8
teachers. On this survey we asked multiple questions about how texting in class affects
students and teachers.
Methods of Materials :
We began this project by coming up with our question and how to test it. We
decided to make a survey with Google Forms. We created two surveys will eleven
questions on each, one for teachers and one for students. We developed questions for
the survey that asked about texting in class and the distractions it causes. We then sent
it out to 40 students, 10 students from each grade, 5 girls and 5 boys. We got 37

responses. After averaging and finding percentages for the responses Ava created
charts to show the results of the questions. We put our graphs and averages together
into one image.
Results:
Before receiving our results for this project, we thought that students and
teachers would be badly affected by texting in class, but our results showed that the
subjects were very neutral about the topic Many of the students admitted that their
peers text in class, but they were not bothered by it. . The only time they seemed
affected by texting in class was when the ringer/sound was on. The subjects estimated
that only 58% of the animas student body texts in class, which was not at all what we
estimated in our hypothesis.
Discussion:
Our project was done to see if texting distracts people in class. We were
expecting the outcome to show that texting distracts both the person texting as well as
their peers. We sent out a survey to 40 people and collected their responses. It seemed
that many of the people text during class but they did not find it distracting when others
texted in class, unless the sound was on. Our results showed that teens are affected by
texting, but their opinions on texting are much more neutral that we imagined.