0000000000042411
AUTHOR
Kai Hakkarainen
Gaming is related to enhanced working memory performance and task-related cortical activity
Gaming experience has been suggested to lead to performance enhancements in a wide variety of working memory tasks. Previous studies have, however, mostly focused on adult expert gamers and have not included measurements of both behavioral performance and brain activity. In the current study, 167 adolescents and young adults (aged 13–24 years) with different amounts of gaming experience performed an n-back working memory task with vowels, with the sensory modality of the vowel stream switching between audition and vision at random intervals. We studied the relationship between self-reported daily gaming activity, working memory (n-back) task performance and related brain activity measured u…
Media multitasking is associated with distractibility and increased prefrontal activity in adolescents and young adults.
The current generation of young people indulges in more media multitasking behavior (e.g., instant messaging while watching videos) in their everyday lives than older generations. Concerns have been raised about how this might affect their attentional functioning, as previous studies have indicated that extensive mediamultitasking in everyday life may be associated with decreased attentional control. In the current study, 149 adolescents and young adults (aged 13-24 years) performed speech-listening and reading tasks that required maintaining attention in the presence of distractor stimuli in the othermodality or dividing attention between two concurrent tasks. Brain activity during task pe…
Is Student Motivation Related to Socio-digital Participation? A Person-oriented Approach
5th ICEEPSY International Conference on Education & Educational Psychology in Kyrenia Cyprus (Oct 22-25, 2014)/ guest editors: Zafer Bekirogullari, Melis Minas. There is a hypothesized gap between the technology-mediated practices of adolescents and school, hindering student motivation and well-being. This study examined how students’ school motivation is associated with ICT-use. Previous research has shown that achievement goal orientations are related to students’ academic and emotional functioning. Simultaneously, adolescents engage in various socio-digital activities on a daily basis. Our aim is to integrate these two approaches to examine whether students with different motivational pr…
Lessons learned on student engagement from the nature of pervasive socio‐digital interests and related network participation of adolescents
The rise of modern socio-digital technologies has fundamentally changed the everyday environments in which young people communicate with each other and cultivate interests. To gain a more sophisticated understanding of this phenomenon, this study provides in-depth, qualitative insights into adolescents’ experiences of their socio-digital developmental ecologies. The 15 interview participants were recruited based on a previously conducted questionnaire. The semi-structured theme interview addressed the socio-digital aspects of the participants’ interest-driven behaviours and related networks with the aid of participant-generated egocentric maps. The data not only qualitatively enrich the pic…
Process-and context-sensitive research on academic knowledge practices
The Contextual Activity Sampling System (CASS) methodology and CASS-Query tools have been developed for the investigation of learning and working practices. The CASS-methods and tools provide contextualized data that allow the analyzing and modeling of within-person changes across time. This paper describes a pilot study with 3G mobiles used by eight engineering students. Students answered questionnaires concerning their ongoing study projects, academic emotions, and collaboration, with a mobile phone five times a day for a period of two weeks (70 queries per person). Variation in their emotions were examined by time-series analysis. Students were also interviewed before and after the CASS-…
A new approach for estimating a nonlinear growth component in multilevel modeling
This study presents a new approach to estimation of a nonlinear growth curve component with fixed and random effects in multilevel modeling. This approach can be used to estimate change in longitudinal data, such as day-of-the-week fluctuation. The motivation of the new approach is to avoid spurious estimates in a random coefficient regression model due to the synchronized periodical effect (e.g., day-of-the-week fluctuation) appearing both in independent and dependent variables. First, the new approach is introduced. Second, a Monte Carlo simulation study is carried out to examine the functioning of the proposed new approach in the case of small sample sizes. Third, the use of the approac…
Peer selection and influence : Students’ interest-driven socio-digital participation and friendship networks
Digital technologies have been increasingly embedded in students’ everyday lives. Interest-driven socio-digital participation (ISDP) involves students’ pursuit of interests mediated by computers, social media, the internet, and mobile devices’ integrated systems.ISDPis likely to intertwine closely with young people’s social networks that has been scarcely studied quantitatively. To close this gap, the present paper investigated students’ peer selection and influence effects of the intensity of their ISDP and friendship networks. We collected two-wave data by administering a peer nomination to trace students’ friendship networks with peers and a self-reported questionnaire to examine student…
School burnout and engagement profiles among digital natives in Finland: a person-oriented approach
AbstractApplying a person-oriented approach, this study set out to examine what profiles of school engagement and school burnout (i.e., exhaustion, cynicism, inadequacy) can be identified among elementary school children at age 12, a generation also often referred to as the generation of digital natives. We compared the group memberships in their use of socio-digital technologies and related functioning as we expected to find a gap between some digital natives and current educational practices which do not include socio-digital technology in feelings of cynicism towards school. Latent profile analysis identified five groups: Engaged (50%) students, who formed the majority; Stressed (4%) stu…