Students are distracted by cellphones

By: Abdullah Aljafary

Cellphone is one of the technologies that everyone has these days, and most students absolutely have one. Cellphones provide many benefits to students and people in general such as calling, texting, and surfing the Internet, and that would be helpful for many students in many situations such as calling a friend to help in something relating to studying. However, cellphones could distract students in studying and attending classes and that would affect their grades negatively.

In classrooms, students need to pay attention to the lecturer or teacher. Many teachers and lecturers teach their students in class, but unfortunately many students get distracted by their cellphones during the class. Students who were distracted during their classes usually missed much important information that was taught, and they missed taking notes that are essential to study from later. As a result, students’ grades will be low. For example, many subjects such as mathematics and science need a complete concentration in order to understand the lesson that the teacher teaches in classroom, so if a student was busy looking up his cellphone, she would not understand the lesson by her own later.

Many students get diverted when they are studying outside the classrooms. Cellphones is one of the most distraction devices during studying time because a student has to focus completely on studying, but cellphones could get a call or a text that would let the student to pick up the call or look up the text message. Additionally, many students surf the social network websites through their cellphones, and many of these social websites have applications that most students downloaded them previously. Moreover, these applications have the feature that notifies the user for any new notifications, so the cellphone would ring for the new notifications during the studying time, and that would disturb the student and distract him or her.

There are many useful ways to avoid being distracted by a cellphone:

• Shut off the cellphone or put it in the silent mode during the class: if the students want to focus and pay attention in class, they have to turn off their cellphones or silent them.
• Turn the cellphone off or silent during studying time: in order to be full concentrated during studying for an exam or for whatever, a student has to follow this advice.
• Use alternative devices: many international students use their cellphones for looking up words that they do not know, so using electronic dictionary would avoid using the cellphones.
• put the cellphone away: after silencing the cellphone, simply put the cellphone away from you.