Experimental Effects of Radio and Television Distractors on Children's Performance on Mathematics and Reading Assignments

One explanation for why many students routinely choose to do their homework with a radio or TV operating is that this distraction facilitates studying. To investigate the validity of this explanation, the authors carried out two experiments with sixth-grade students who worked on two difficulty levels of individualized mathematics assignments (N = 12) and reading assignments (N = 9) under three distraction conditions: quiet; self-selected, self-regulated radio; and self-selected, self-regulated TV. The data yielded no evidence of sizable distractor effects on students' time spent studying, computational accuracy, reading comprehension, or reading rate. These results generally are consistent with the theoretical conceptualization of attention as flexible and adaptable.