They Do It All While Studying

If you think peace, quiet and uninterrupted focus are the keys to good study habits, 16-year-old Ryan Arnold may prove you wrong.

While doing his homework, the North Carolina high school junior typically does at least four other tasks as well -- among them listening to music, playing a PlayStation 2 game, sending e-mail and surfing the Web.

"It drives me crazy," his mother, Cindy Hensley, said of her son's many activities. "I can't do it. I say, 'If I can't do it, then how can you do it?' But he's a straight-A student, so I guess he does."

Time was, homework meant hunkering down in the library or a quiet study carrel. Today, instead of seeking to minimize distractions while studying, a majority of children are embracing them, according to a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll.

Among respondents who had homework, 53% of children ages 12 to 17 said they did at least one other thing while studying, compared with 25% of adults ages 18 to 24, the poll found.

The youngest poll respondents did the most juggling. Twenty-one percent of the 839 respondents ages 12 to 17 who were polled said they generally kept busy with at least three tasks in addition to their assignments.

Girls ages 15 to 17 were the busiest: 59% said they liked to do at least one thing in addition to homework, and 27% said they liked to do at least three other things.

"I'll focus on my schoolwork, then if an e-mail pops up I'll change focus for a second, answer it, then go back to what I was working on," said Brittany Graham, 16, who also likes to surf the Web and listen to Christian rock while she studies in her family's home in Altamonte Springs, Fla.

Kids' fondness for multi-tasking is raising concerns among psychologists and educators. They worry that students are taking longer to complete their assignments while absorbing less information than they would if they were focusing solely on schoolwork.

Some scientists fear that multi-tasking could even stunt the development of adolescent brains. The ability to give up instant gratification in favor of long-term goals, for example, is largely controlled by the prefrontal cortex, the brain's "executive center." That's the same area of the brain that, among other things, determines correct social behavior and steers attention from one task to another.