Web Browsing, Mobile Computing and Academic Performance

Students in two different courses at a major research university (one a Communication course, the other a Computer Science course) were given laptop computers with wireless network access during the course of a semester. Students’ Web browsing on these laptops (including: URLs, dates, and times) was recorded 24 hours/day, 7 days/week in a log file by a proxy server during most of a semester (about 15 weeks). For each student, browsing behavior was quantified and then correlated with academic performance. The emergence of statistically significant results suggests that quantitative characteristics of browsing behavior—even prior to examining browsing content—can be useful predictors of meaningful behavioral outcomes. Variables such as Number of browsing sessions and Length of browsing sessions were found to correlate with students’ final grades; the valence and magnitude of these correlations were found to interact with Course (i.e., whether student was enrolled in the Communication or Computer Science course), Browsing Context (i.e., setting in which browsing took place: during class, on the wireless network between classes , or at home) and Gender. The implications of these findings in relation to previous studies of laptop use in education settings are discussed.