Week 10: A glance at the info

Hey everyone, welcome back to week ten of my senior research project. I cannot believe we are almost at the finish line! This has been one of the most rewarding and eye-opening experiences of my academic career, and I am so excited to start pulling everything together for the final presentation. 

This week, I have been deep in the data, and the findings are more interesting than I even anticipated going into this. Let me share what I am seeing. The first thing that jumped out at me is that the phone-present group actually peaked higher on average than the phone-absent group across the learning trials, 9.7 words versus 6.6 words at their best. At first glance, that sounds like phones are not the problem, right? But here is where it gets really interesting. Once the interference trial hit, the phone-present group dropped significantly harder, an average drop of 1.5 words, while the phone-absent group barely budged, dropping only 0.3. So yes, they climbed higher, but their retention was far more fragile under pressure. 

The finding I am most excited about, though, is what the Cell Phone Addiction Scale reveals when you cross-reference it with performance. Students who scored above the addiction threshold dropped an average of 1.82 words after interference. Students below that threshold? They actually improved slightly. 

That tells me it is not just about whether the phone is in the room. It is about your baseline relationship with your phone and how deeply that has rewired your ability to hold onto information when disruption hits. There is still a lot to unpack here, and I cannot wait to bring it all together next week for the final presentation.