An Antecedent and Impact of Cyberloafing among Students

Access to the internet has become more common for children and adolescents, and so has its propensity to be used for non-academic purposes. Cyberloafing includes activities like internet browsing, online gaming, updating personal blogs, replying to personal emails, enjoying social media, or adult websites while attending online classes or doing academic work. Since the boundary between personal and academic work is blurrier now than before, the issue of cyberloafing has gained more relevance. We, therefore, are synthesizing the current evidence on associated factors, and the positive and negative impact of cyberloafing among students.

Antecedent Factors

The perceived approval of cyberloafing by peers in the classroom played an important role in the maintenance of this behavior. Students perceived cyberloafing as a fun, exciting, and enjoyable activity, these positive expectancies served as a motivation to persist with cyberloafing behavior. It is further mediated by children’s or adolescents’ attitudes towards cyberloafing.^1,2 The other factors included accessibility to technology, excessive use of technology, boredom, academic-related distress, the role of extraversion, neuroticism and escapism.^3–6

Positive Impact

Cyberloafing for short durations in nonacademic-related activities like social media sites, browsing noneducational sites, emailing, and so on, may have positive effects, such as relief from boredom, or stress, creativity, and recreation. Additionally, cyberloafing may allow access to newer information and knowledge, and fresh perspectives. The use of computers in classroom instruction could potentially have a positive impact on children’s or adolescents’ motivation to study and increase academic achievement when appropriately utilized. ⁷

Negative Impact

Cyberloafing is linked with poor outcomes because cyberloafing compels students to perform multiple tasks, reducing time, energy, and attention that could be allocated to learning, and it distracts the students’ attention and prevents them from focusing on learning. It reduces students’ active participation in learning activities in the classroom, which negatively affects students’ academic performance by splitting them from classroom learning processes, resulting in more disengaged behaviors. Cyberloafing brings a burden on the cognitive resources of students that could have been used for classroom learning. ⁸

Conclusions

Cyberloafing may respond to student’s needs and be used as a method of coping with stress or boredom. However, due to the increased accessibility of gadgets during COVID-19, it has emerged as a problem. Preventing cyberloafing in the classroom is difficult due to the widespread availability of mobile devices and easy access to the internet. Instead of banning technology, minimizing its negative effects while enhancing its effective learning outcomes may be a better answer to classroom internet overuse. Existing studies suggest that self-regulation/self-control is an essential factor in managing cyberloafing. Researchers and educators must develop preventive interventions on healthy internet use habits, emotion regulation control skills, and use approaches that shift possible negative effects into positive effective learning.^9,10