Mobile devices are appearing everywhere, including in colleges classrooms, but how do they impact student learning.

Previous studies have shown that students who text or use their mobile devices in class generally recall less about the classroom content than those who do not. Similarly, those who used mobile devices in class took notes of poorer quality, detracting from another cognitive process by which students integrate new material.

For the current study, researchers tested students using mobile devices in class to respond to messages that were related or unrelated to classroom material; additionally, the researchers varied the form of the messages (responding to another message or composing an original one) and the frequency of the texts.

They found that students who replied to messages relevant to class material scored higher on multiple choice tests than students who replied to messages that were unrelated to the class.

Based on their findings, researchers concluded that "sending or receiving relevant messages may allow students to engage in similar processes as those that occur during note-taking. Specifically, relevant messages may allow students to encode lecture content in a manner similar to the processes that occur during note-taking."

Their findings suggest that the frequency of messaging was also a factor in the interruption of learning.

Students who tweeted or sent messages frequently on content not related to the class took lower quality notes than those who tweeted less frequently on non-classroom related subjects. They also scored up to 17 percent lower than the control group on multiple-choice tests, evidence that engaging in messaging unrelated to the class hurts student learning.

The findings are detailed in the journal Communication Education.