PERCEPTION OF THE USE OF THE SMARTPHONE IN CLASS AS A WAY OF MEASURING THE ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE STUDY D. Mejía, A. Franco-Crespo, F. Herrera, V. Ramos Escuela Politécnica Nacional (ECUADOR) Abstract The technological disruption that has happened on the latest decades had unexpected results that directly or indirectly affects the human behavior and the person’s performance in different academic activities. Thus, in this article we pretend to assess the smartphone use, possible addiction and academic impact that the smartphone can have on college students. In order to quantify this, we surveyed 105 business administration students using the Smartphone Addiction Proneness Scale (SAPS), in return, we found that just 1.90% of them exhibited a high level of smartphone addiction risk. Also, exploratory questions were put in place to evaluate the students’ behavior while using their smartphone under certain academic circumstances, leading us to fund that a significant percentage of the group would actually use the smartphone even when it seemed counterproductive to do it so and regardless of the negative academic consequences that such behavior is bound to yield. This will allow to the different faculties and colleges to take appropriate regulatory measures for the e-device use during class based on the results and more investigations if it is needed. Keywords: Smartphone, Technology, Study attitudes. 1 INTRODUCTION A variety of studies show that there is a negative correlation between academic performance and the use of smartphones, social media and videogames during class (Pool, Van der Voort, Beentjes, & Koolstra, 2000). Levine, Waite, & Bowman (2007) discovered that the students who sent a higher amount of SMS than their counterparts who do not, are the ones that show a higher distraction level while performing academic tasks. The communication between individual’s trough electronic media has undoubtedly expand at a global scale during the last few years due to always increasingly efficiency and accessibility of these new types of technology which simplifies the intercommunication process through the almost instantaneous information interchange. One of the many electronic tools which main function is to communicate people —even though it does not limit itself do this function— is the smartphone. The smartphone is an electronic device that combines the benefits of a cellphone and the internet services (Cha & Seo, 2018). Globally, smartphones were used by 1.85 billion of people, and early forecasts predicted that the number would rise to 2.65 billion by 2019 (Statista, 2017). Griffiths (2000) mentions how the actual fascination with cellphones in general, and smartphones specifically, encourage people to spend relatively less time with each other. In fact, the excessive level of fascination that smartphones cause in specific demographic groups such as young adults and college students is in fact one of the main problems of this technology Massimini & Peterson (2009; Shambare, Rugimbana, & Zhowa, 2012). At the educational level, the use of electronic devices in class related to non-academic activities has been cataloged by some intellectuals as detrimental to learning and is considered a factor that interferes with the learning environment of others (Brazeau & Brazeau, 2009; Fink, 2010). Therefore, one of the biggest disadvantages of using electronic devices in class is the tendency of students to perform activities without any relation to the academic part, such as sending, checking emails and accessing information available on the Internet (DeGane, 2007). Not to mention that the rapid growth of technology has made young people impatient, as young people seek to get things faster, cheaper and in a simpler manner than ever before (The Inspectorate, 2008) 1.1 Technology, interpersonal interactions and learning Turkle (2015) says it is possible to assert that technology causes the illusion of being accompanied by not having to deal with the demands of friendship in physical form. It is probable that one of the reasons why this happens, is that cell phones are seen as critical factors to maintain social relations Proceedings of EDULEARN19 Conference 1st-3rd July 2019, Palma, Mallorca, Spain ISBN: 978-84-09-12031-4 9686