Mind wandering, control failures, and social media distractions in online learning R. Benjamin Hollis * , Christopher A. Was Kent State University, United States article info Article history: Received 30 March 2015 Received in revised form 8 January 2016 Accepted 15 January 2016 Available online 1 February 2016 Keywords: Mind wandering Working memory Online learning abstract Mind wandering often leads to performance and accuracy errors during activities that are demanding and require concentration. Students are often asked to concentrate on demanding tasks in their studies, and by the nature of this principle, off-task thinking would inherently be prohibitive to their success. Further, the distracting nature of social media and technology may greatly increase the likelihood of mind wandering when students are engaged in online learning, requiring them to engage with said technology. To examine the relationships among working memory, interest, mind wandering and per- formance, 126 participants from at a large Midwestern state university completed three complex span tasks, responded to mind-wandering probes while watching two online lectures and rated interest in the lecture topics. Higher levels of mind wandering predicted lower levels of academic performance. Lower levels of working memory capacity predicted higher levels of mind wandering and lower levels of ac- ademic performance. Higher levels of topic interest predicted lower levels of mind wandering. A novel mind wandering probe, thinking about or using another technology, accounted for 29% of all off-task thinking. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Mind wandering is a shift from an ongoing activity to task- unrelated thoughts. These drifting thoughts are quite common; we mind wander 30%e50% of the time on our daily lives (Levinson, Smallwood, & Davidson, 2012; McVay & Kane, 2012b). And this common mind wandering experience can result in deficits. When tasks require concentration or are cognitively demanding, wan- dering to task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs) often leads to perfor- mance and accuracy errors on the primary activity (e.g. McVay & Kane, 2009; McVay & Kane, 2012b; Unsworth & McMillan, 2013). Therefore, investigating individual differences in mind wandering and the impact on performance is particularly relevant in an educational setting because of the inclination for the mind to wander and the resulting performance deficits. The goal of this study was to examine individual differences in mind wandering, working memory capacity, interest, and performance in an online classroom. 1.1. Mind wandering in education Researching mind wandering in online education fills the gap between this study and previously studied contexts for off-task thinking. Now that much of post-secondary education takes place online, in the current study we hoped to understand how mind wandering, interest, and working memory interact to impact stu- dent learning. Most critically, our key questions and predictions are based on the Control Failures X Concerns theory of mind wandering that was proposed by McVay and Kane (2009; 2010). According to this theory, when people have a control failure “off-task intrusions are automatically generated from a continuous stream of thought on the basis of current concerns of the individual and cued by the environment” (McVay & Kane, 2012b, p. 326). In an online envi- ronment, one possible distractor is the technology itself. Junco (2012) and Wood et al. (2012) demonstrated that multitasking with social media and related technologies led to poorer academic performance. Thus, one unique prediction from this theory that we explore is that students engaged in online learning activities will experience mind wandering in relation to personally relevant technologies, and in turn, this mind wandering will relate to poor performance in the class. As one would expect, mind wandering is frequent in traditional * Corresponding author. Office of Continuing and Distance Education, Kent State University, 220 Lincoln Building, Kent, OH, 44242, United States. E-mail address: rbhollis@kent.edu (R.B. Hollis). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Learning and Instruction journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/learninstruc http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2016.01.007 0959-4752/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Learning and Instruction 42 (2016) 104e112