Less all-nighters, no less junk food.

GUEST COLUMN | by Christopher Klundt

It’s a well-known fact in the education world that mobile devices are fundamentally changing the classroom environment, but what about the impact of mobile devices outside of the classroom?

According to Pew Research, about 37% of U.S. teens have smartphones and 23% of those teens have a tablet device. A recent Pearson study reported that the percentage of smartphones increases substantially in higher education, with 72% of college students regularly using smartphones.

The increasing ubiquity of mobile technology provides an opportunity to place the power of learning into students’ hands — both literally and figuratively. Change happens slowly in schools and institutions due to budget and administration processes, which is why it’s more important than ever to provide quality educational resources directly to students on the devices they’re already using every day.

Because teenagers aren’t just interested in using their devices for selfies or dating, they’re actually using these phones to study. Our team recently conducted a survey of our users to figure out just how mobile has (and hasn’t) changed the ways kids study. Some of the results may surprise you!

Studying offline, online, and in between

Students are increasingly studying across all of their devices from laptops to smartphones to tablets. While 43% of students still use good old fashioned pen and paper, 26% of students rely on their laptops, 14% use their mobile phones for studying, and 12% prefer tablets.

Turning wasted time into study time

Mobile devices are also helping students forgo long study sessions in lieu of studying throughout the day — more than half of respondents said they study five times daily, whether that’s while during work or school (25%), on their commute (18%), or even while taking a bathroom break (10%).

Open online what?

Surprisingly, the majority of today’s tech-savvy students are out of the loop when it comes to the latest tech trends in education. Only 9% of students have taken a MOOC (massive open online course) and 76% of students have no clue what a ‘flipped classroom’ means.

Ice cream, concertos, and cramming

The survey also demonstrated that some things will never change — junk food is still the favorite brain food, Beethoven is still the best study music, and procrastination is still running rampant across campuses.

Check out the full infographic for more.

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Christopher Klundt is the founder and president of StudyBlue, a collaborative learning app used by over 5.5 million students to master any subject.