Determination of cyberloafing level of speech and language therapy department students

Abstract

Cyberloafing is the use of (e.g. smartphones, tablets, laptops, and the Internet) for purposes other than work related reasons during work hours. Although cyberloafing in the workplace has been widely investigated, there is relatively a small number of studies on cyberloafing behaviors in educational settings, which refer to students' tendencies to use technology for non-class-related purposes during lectures. The goal of the current study is to determine how frequently and for what purposes speech and language therapy (SLT) students at Biruni University engage in cyberloafing during lectures. In this quantitative study, The Cyberloafing Scale was administered to 264 undergraduate students (235 female; 27 male; 2 preferred not to disclose). The results revealed that SLT students’ cyberloafing behavior was very high. However, there is no statistically significant difference between the gender variable and the overall mean score for cyberloafing. There is a statistically significant difference between genders in gaming/gambling subscale favoring males and in shopping subscale favoring females. Further studies should be conducted to analyze cyberloafing behavior in health education.