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Abstract The authors investigated faculty and student perceptions regarding the use of cell phones and other electronic devices in the classroom. Students differed markedly from faculty, with students exhibiting much greater acceptance of in-class use of technology. Among students, the authors found that gender affected perceptions. Specifically, male students were more accepting of in-class use of technology than were female students. Also, graduate students were more disturbed by off-task use of laptop computers in class than their undergraduate counterparts. This research should be of interest to postsecondary educators and administrators in attempting to bridge the student-faculty generation gap, and in formulating policies regarding the use of electronic devices in the classroom. Keywords: cell phonescell-phone policieslaptopsMP3 playersstudents versus facultytechnology Notes 1. Although there is no precise definition of the term millennials, it typically refers to persons born in the early 1980s or later and therefore roughly corresponds to anyone who is presently under 30 years old. This constitutes the majority of today's college students. However, the term digital native is probably better reserved for the under-25 age group because Internet and cell phone usage actually became widespread in the mid- to late 1990s and early 2000s, respectively. 2. Faculty members were instructed to stop after the first 49 questions. 3. The survey instrument and additional details regarding the survey methods and testing are available from the authors upon request. The range of the standard deviations for all 5-point Likert scale responses was 0.8023 to 1.2260. The unweighted mean of the standard deviations was 0.9951, and the standard deviation of the standard deviations was 0.0936. A complete listing of the standard deviations for each response reported in the tables is available upon request. 4. Participation rates were over 95% in every class surveyed. 5. For the three schools used in our survey, approximately 80%, 70%, and 72%, of the business school faculty were men at the New York, North Carolina, and Texas schools, respectively. Because the North Carolina faculty was by far the largest, the corresponding figure was 72% male faculty for the three schools combined. 6. Again, we note that the responses are very consistent across these two similar questions, which were placed two pages apart in the survey, giving us confidence in the validity of our results. 7. For students and faculty, women believe more strongly than men that such comments are inappropriate.
Baker et al. (Sun,) studied this question.