The Why…

Despite the digital policies school districts have created, and integrated, across the globe in secondary-level schools, stakeholders, especially teachers, are still scrambling to maintain students’ learning focus and academic engagement in our post-Covid educational landscape. 1:1 learning environments have become the norm across public American high schools as districts continue to use a variety of synchronous, asynchronous, in-person, remote, and hybrid learning structures. But even though technology appeared to be a silver bullet of sorts for engagement as schools infused more and more technology into the classroom setting during the early 2000s, the advent of school-issued mobile devices (i.e., Google Chromebook, iPad, tablets), coupled with students’ personal electronics (i.e., cell phones and smartwatches), the tide is beginning to shift as student focus, engagement, knowledge retention, and learning transfer continue to worsen and deteriorate. As a twenty-seven-year educator, this chapter focuses not only on the why of this digital distraction phenomenon and its significance, but it introduces the reader to a generalizable study, one which provides guidance for educational stakeholders in trying to minimize digital distraction during learning, no matter if learning is happening synchronously, asynchronously, remotely, or in-person.