They instant message while doing homework with the TV or favorite music on and then fire off a text message while responding to a parent in the other room. It's a bird! A plane! It's your multi-tasking teen! Much has been said about teens' seeming ability to do several things typically involving technology simultaneously. And while this is true to a degree, many experts and even a few teens themselves question whether they're doing any particular task really well.

One of the teens I interviewed for Totally Wired admitted that while her generation may have gotten really good at multi-tasking, she can't really do it. She said, "If I'm doing my homework and get a phone call, I have to turn off the music. I just have to put something away or turn it off. Some people are insane, they will even talk using the speaker phone."

The Sacramento Bee recently ran a story on teens and multitasking and referred to the following findings from the Kaiser Foundation's 2005 research:

- The actual number of hours devoted to media has remained the same at 6 1/2 hours a day, but teens are spending more of that time multitasking.

- While watching TV, reading, listening to music or using a computer, about a quarter of kids surveyed said they use another form of media at the same time.

One of the most comprehensive stories on this issue was published in TIME magazine back in March and can be read online here. The TIME article asserts that successful teen multi-tasking when it comes to homework is a myth:

"When people try to perform two or more related tasks either at the same time or alternating rapidly between them, errors go way up, and it takes far longer--often double the time or more--to get the jobs done than if they were done sequentially, says David E. Meyer, director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan: 'The toll in terms of slowdown is extremely large--amazingly so.' Meyer frequently tests Gen M students in his lab, and he sees no exception for them, despite their 'mystique' as master multitaskers. '

The bottom line is that you can't simultaneously be thinking about your tax return and reading an essay, just as you can't talk to yourself about two things at once,' he says. 'If a teenager is trying to have a conversation on an e-mail chat line while doing algebra, she'll suffer a decrease in efficiency, compared to if she just thought about algebra until she was done. People may think otherwise, but it's a myth. With such complicated tasks [you] will never, ever be able to overcome the inherent limitations in the brain for processing information during multitasking. It just can't be, any more than the best of all humans will ever be able to run a one-minute mile.'"

Instead of watching your teen in front of the computer from a distance, worrying that they are spending too much time online, or that their multitasking is hurting their schoolwork, try asking them the following questions in a friendly, non-confrontational way:

- Is being online distracting you from getting your homework done? Is it taking you a lot longer to complete assignments? Does it make it easier to procrastinate?
- Can you really concentrate with the music or TV on?
- When your friends call or IM while you're doing your homework, how does that affect your concentration? Do you have to go back and reread or redo what you were doing?

Based on how this conversation goes, i.e. if it's clear they are struggling, there may be some really practical things your teen can do to make the most of their study time like:

- Turn down the music or TV or turn it off
- Create an "I'm studying" away message on IM
- Turn the cellphone off (so they can't get calls or texts)
- Stay offline when they are word processing or doing something that just needs to get done (without the Internet)

See also: The CBSNews.com article "This is your brain online."

Update: The Kaiser Foundation just released a new study on how teens multitask.