How Gadgets Negatively Affect Student Academic Performance

Technology plays a significant part in our lives, whether you’re a working professional or academically-inclined student. Thanks to new technology and advanced gadgets, the world is constantly developing and becoming smaller than we thought.

Today, independent learning through the use of advanced gadgets and technology is growing in popularity, offering more learning opportunities, self-motivation, and better communication skills.

Despite all the positive changes that these gadgets bring along, there are also adverse effects worth noting on how they affect student academic performance.

How Gadgets Affect Academic Performance Negatively

It’s worth noting that adverse effects only surface when there’s excessive use or misuse of something. The overuse of a device can result in children becoming addicted to gadgets and technology like smartphones, tablets, video games, and computers. As time goes on, this can reduce a student’s reason, ability, and interest to learn. For this reason, it’s always advisable to limit how often a student should use a gadget.

Sleep

A child or student that’s addicted to using gadgets more than the recommended limit may fall into the trap of developing an irregular sleeping pattern. Electronic gadgets have an artificial blue light that comes through them. This reduces a hormone known as melatonin that’s responsible for inducing you into sleep. This explains why people struggle to fall asleep while busy with a gadget.

Students who struggle to switch off their gadgets during the late hours of the night may risk delaying their bedtime. When this becomes a habit, delayed sleeping patterns become more of a habit, and that’s when the student begins to show less focus during learning.

Eyesight

Nowadays, you find many students wearing glasses. Not all students have weak eyesight, but a lot of time spent close to a screen may encourage blurred vision because of an electronic gadget’s excessive use. Also, this adds to discomfort when it’s time to sleep at night.

Health

An addiction to technology and gadgets can lead to an unhealthy lifestyle. Spending too much time staring at a screen can lead to poor posture and diet. In most cases, entertainment is the main reason students spend a lot of time on a gadget. Excessive time on a gadget is hardly due to any academic involvement.

Because entertaining things like video games can go on for hours, children may forget to eat on time, drink water, or move around since they’ll spend more time in the same place. With enough time, this could lead to cases like:

• Hand, neck, and back pain
• Headaches
• Eye problems
• Diabetes
• Obesity
• Trouble in passing gas

Mental And Behavior Changes

Sometimes, an addiction to things like video games can slow down the brain’s development. And according to research, students that spend a lot of time on gadgets are also likely to become increasingly violent and lose interest in things surrounding them in their immediate environments. This behavior can also encourage laziness and less interest in academics. All this will ultimately contribute to poor personality traits in the long run.

Learning

Using gadgets under moderation can encourage positive outcomes, even if you’re learning something as simple as applying NFL lines to an NFL bet or performing an advanced search in the browser. A gadget’s misuse reduces a student’s learning ability and interest in doing anything outdoors. This can easily make the student feel the need to sacrifice other learning experiences and feel like there’s not enough time to do other things. This will turn out to be harmful.

A gadget addiction can make the student struggle to complete school work because time mismanagement and poor discipline habits will start interfering with important sessions like study times.

Social

Overusing a gadget can take the student away from real-time human connection, eventually affecting all their social relationships. This could encourage the student to engage with online friends more, making them uneasy when they need to have face-to-face encounters with people.