Distractions In The Classroom

Distractions are everywhere. They are inevitable and they happen all the time. I personally am surrounded by distractions: my floor-mates, the Internet, music, the television, and even your mood can be a distraction. This topic has always intrigued me because I never know what I should do when I’m studying or doing homework. A distraction is something that prevents you from giving full attention to a task. In saying that, distractions can come from almost anywhere. There are external distractions such as people talking, and internal distractions such as your mood and emotions. It is generally believed that any sort of distraction while you’re studying or doing homework will negatively effect your performance, but some, including me, do hold
The whole idea of a test taking area is to try and limit the amount of distractions as possible. This is done because distractions during a test will affect your performance. In an article written by Donald Super & William Braasch (2010), the authors describe an experiment done in order to observe the effect of distractions on test results. What the experimenters did was they had two different groups taking the Minnesota Vocational Test for Clerical Workers and the Otis Quick-Scoring Mental Ability Test and one group was given many distractions while the other group was left alone to take the test in silence. These distractions included a teacher walking into the classroom, people talking in the halls loudly, and a trumpet playing in a different room. In the end, the group with the distractions did in fact do worse than the group that was left alone; however, there wasn’t a significant statistical difference in the grades and they concluded that the distractions were not distracting enough to really show a correlation (Super & Braasch,
There are internal distractions that can arguably be just as significant as external distraction. A few examples of internal distractions are anxiety, stress, fear, and your mood. Unrelated thoughts and actions to your task can all be distractions while working. Nadine Jung et al (2014) describe an experiment conducted in which different groups of participants had to pass a manipulated intelligence test. In this experiment they observed how a participant in a negative, positive, or neutral mood performed on the test given. The participants were asked to fill out questions ranging from most difficult to easy. One group was given the hard questions while another group received the easiest questions. In order to manipulate the participant’s moods, the experimenters gave verbal feedback in order to facilitate whichever mood they wanted the participants to be in. The participants then were given another test and there were results were recorded. The experiment proved that mood and emotions do affect brain performance (Jung et al, 2014). The results revealed that the participants with a positive mood performed better than those in a negative mood and the neutral mood sample performed averagely. They also performed an experiment with people who have a spider phobia or an exam phobia. These people were asked to answer problems with their corresponding phobia (spider or exam). This is a very fascinating type of internal distraction that