I totally agree with this article. I've been playing a lot of video games in the past, always with the T.V. on, all while doing my homeworks and reading my school notes. I failed a few classes during that period of my life, and I finished pre-university a year later than expected. It turns out that it didn't pay off at all.
At the moment, I'm in University while working full-time, and my grades are where they should have been years ago. I'm getting As most of the time, and I believe it has a lot to do with how I handle my tasks. Since I'm only doing two classes at a time, I try to focus on one a week, on the other the next. I try to never work on two different subjects on the same day and I even force myself to avoid reading some article and trying new things because it would take my focus away from what I really have to do.
Dedicating our attention on one subject at a time always turns out better.
Anecdotes like yours don't prove anything. That's why we have science.
Without a control group and test group we don't know if your conclusions are statistically valid. Maybe most people get better grades when they watch TV and play video games.
I probably mis-worded my thoughts. I did not meant "it's true for x therefore it's true for the whole set". It's definetly not something we can generalize. At least, we can say that he's not completely wrong.
Nevertheless, I still believe that if such study was conducted, it would tend in that direction. The actual difference between a multi-tasker and a uni-tasker might not be very large, there might even not be any difference in some cases. Considering how the memory supposedly works, I find it hard to believe that one would retain the equivalent amount of information while multi-tasking than while uni-tasking.
At the moment, I'm in University while working full-time, and my grades are where they should have been years ago. I'm getting As most of the time, and I believe it has a lot to do with how I handle my tasks. Since I'm only doing two classes at a time, I try to focus on one a week, on the other the next. I try to never work on two different subjects on the same day and I even force myself to avoid reading some article and trying new things because it would take my focus away from what I really have to do.
Dedicating our attention on one subject at a time always turns out better.