Digital multitasking during academic lectures: Did the Covid-19 lockdown change the students’ behavior?

Abstract

[EN] This paper explores digital multitasking during lectures for university students, attending to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. Digital multitasking is conceptualized in this research as engaging in a digital task (T1) during academic lectures (T2). This paper has three main goals: 1. Analyze the variations in digital multitasking in three different moments – pre-pandemic (M1), during the lockdown (M2), and after the Covid-19 pandemic (M3); 2. Explore the purpose by which students engage in digital multitasking – exclusive educational (ED), exclusive non-educational (NED), and combined (COMB), combining educational and non-educational purposes; 3. Explore the digital resources – between 16 categories – used in multitasking during lectures and their relationship with the different purposes – ED, NED, and COMB. This quantitative research appeals to the survey and descriptive, comparative, and correlational analysis. Results show that multitasking during lectures is expected among university students and has changed with Covid-19 to a more educational purpose.