They invited 47 classmates at Columbia Falls High School to take part in a two-phase experiment. The goal was to measure how well these students understood written material. Each participants had to read a paragraph or two about a certain topic, then answer a question about it.

　　In the first phase, the teenager participants had 15 minutes to digest and then answer questions about six reading exercises. Throughout this testing, the volunteers encountered no distractions.

　　A little later, Colter and Colin had their participants tackle a new set of readings. This time, the brothers used a computer program to send texts to the volunteers' cellphones every 90 seconds. In each text, fictional character named

　　"Bob" asked questions that required a reply. One example: What's your favorite type of music?

　　Results were enlightening, the Norick brothers found. In theory, volunteers should have scored better, not worse, on the second test because it was slightly easier. In fact, the participants scored 9 percent worse overall when distracted by incoming texts asking for some response. Only a few students scored as well when replying to text as they did when undistracted. But importantly, Colter and Colin say, nobody performed better during the texting phase.

　　Boys and girls scored equally poorly while texting, the brothers note. Older volunteers didn't do any better than younger ones. And it didn't matter if a student thought he or she was good at multitasking. On average, the brothers found that even students who were confident of their abilities did just as poorly while texting. Oddly, even though the students remembered less of what they read while texting, most of them answered questions in Bob's texts perfectly.

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