Friday Mindset #181

Happy Friday!

Let’s dive straight in this week.

Something we're reading...

We crossed paths with a really interesting study recently. 600-odd students’ time management skills, and decision-making skills, were assessed against their use of social media. We know that high levels of engagement with short-form video reduce concentration, but might they affect time management, and even decision-making?

Well… the effect sizes are small but the answer is yes, as it turns out. Before we look at the study itself, we thought you might be interested in the two scales used to measure (i) time management and (ii) decision making. Your own students could take the questionnaires if you wanted to involve them, reproduce the study, or just raise awareness.

The time management measure is a famous one - if students want to take the questionnaire themselves, you can use this image:

And students can take the decision-making questionnaire used in the study here:

OK, on to the study itself, which is here:

But what were the exact findings? we hear you cry. Effect-sizes are small, but…

• “we observed a positive association between academic achievement and time management skills… time management behaviours (e.g., goal setting) are related to perceived control, which in turn is associated with beneficial outcomes such as reduced stress and better performance.”

• “…longer social media use emerged as a significant negative predictor of the time planning, time attitudes and time wasters subscales. These results suggest that higher levels of social media use tend to be accompanied by lower time management scores.”

• “We found positive associations between social media use and the buckpassing, procrastinating, and hypervigilance dimensions of [decision-making]… greater social media use was associated with lower decision self-esteem and lower vigilance (careful decision-making).”

Interesting stuff!

Portal Talk...

Staying with phones for a little longer now. During student sessions, we’re often gathering live responses to questions, then showing students their compiled answers. One of our questions is, “in a one-hour revision session, how many times do you check your phone?” Here’s some data we collected in a recent session:

Over half say it is 6 times or more. Less than ten percent say they don’t check for the full hour. Blimey. As our activity in The VESPA Handbook, Deep Work and Distraction Cost explores, if students are breaking concentration every few minutes, revision becomes shallower, slower and far less effective. That’s why we spend so much time helping students build stronger routines and more deliberate control over their attention!

We were interested recently to speak with Bertie Aspinall, Co-Founder of SafetyMode ,

SafetyMode has been developed in partnership with Mumsnet. They’re a social impact product - the plan is to give schools more control over students’ smartphone use on site. In effect, it allows schools to limit which apps are accessible on school grounds, making smartphones a lot less smart, at least during the school day. The platform also includes gizmos that can block or flag harmful content in real time, without data leaving the phone.

SafetyMode is currently looking for schools interested in joining a trial, and we’re happy to help them spread the word. Participating schools can offer the tool to parents at a discounted rate, hopefully helping align the approach between school and home. So if your school is trying to balance the reality that students have smartphones, parents expect contact, and staff don’t want to spend all day acting as app police as well as asking every second kid to tuck their shirt in, Safetymode might be worth a look. If you’re interested, contact Bertie at [email protected] or Tony at [email protected] or find out more by clicking the logo above.

…and if you’d like to see how we help schools tackle revision habits, focus and independent learning more broadly, you can book a short demo of the VESPA Portal here:

Something to try...

We’ve got a video for you today! In it, Martin discusses reward systems designed to motivate students to revise effectively.

Not all organisations have this one right. Some assume the exam results are reward enough, others over-reward what should be expected study-behaviours; it’s a tricky balance to strike, so hopefully this could give you a starting point for discussion…

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