Y11W10WR The multitasking story
Map the state of the multitasking research, distinguishing what held up from Nass’s work to what may not transfer to today’s students.
1Retrieval check
Q1.What did Clifford Nass’s research on heavy media-multitaskers find?
- AThey were better at task-switching
- BThey performed worse on task-switching, working memory, and sustained attention — the opposite of the skill they thought they were practising
- CThey were more focused than others
- DThey suffered no cognitive effects
Q2.What is the article’s counter-thread about multitasking?
- AAll multitasking is equally costly
- BSome tasks genuinely parallelise (walking and listening); the problem is claiming to parallelise tasks that demand comparable cognitive attention
- CMultitasking is always productive
- DYounger brains can multitask better than older ones
Show answer key
Q1 → B. They performed worse on task-switching, working memory, and sustained attention — the opposite of the skill they thought they were practising.Heavy multitaskers performed worse on the very skills they believed they were training — rapid task-switching carries real cognitive cost.
Q2 → B. Some tasks genuinely parallelise (walking and listening); the problem is claiming to parallelise tasks that demand comparable cognitive attention.The issue isn’t ‘doing two things at once’ — it’s doing two things that both require full attention, which can’t actually be done at once.
2Prompt deconstruction
- Command verb
- MAP — categorise the article’s claims by evidential strength
- You pick
- specific claims to place in each category
- Goal
- distinguish the underlying cognitive finding from generational extrapolation; end with what a current-day replication would need
- Must reference
- Nass’s findings AND the article’s honest acknowledgement of population/time-specificity
3Pick nudge
Which parts of the multitasking evidence are solid, limited or overextended?
4Planner — categorise the claims
5Sentence stems
- The claim that ___ is robustly supported, because ___.
- The claim that ___ replicates only partially — specifically, when ___.
- The popular version of ___ has been walked back; the careful version is ___.
- The genuinely open question is ___.
- A study that would resolve this would ___.
- On the weight of evidence, the article’s own position is ___.
6Exemplar paragraph (not about this article)
(1) The robust core finding is that task-switching carries cognitive cost: this replicates across populations and years. (2) The Nass-specific finding — that heavy media-multitaskers have worse working memory than light users — is less cleanly replicated and may reflect Nass’s specific 2009 university sample. (3) The claim that today’s students are categorically different because of phones is unproven either way; no clean study has compared matched cohorts across decades. (4) Claims that multitasking ‘rewires’ the brain go beyond any of this. (5) A conclusive modern replication would need longitudinal tracking of a large, diverse cohort with pre-registered measures; it has not been done because running such a study is expensive and slow.
What this paragraph does, move by move
- Robust claim with scope.
- Specific claim flagged as sample-bound.
- Generational extrapolation named as unproven.
- Over-reach identified.
- Specifies what a resolving study would require.
- Choosing a selection results in a full page refresh.
- Opens in a new window.