The importance of attention in learning
... as an educator, it is crucial to know how to gain your students’ attention, how to keep your students’ attention, and how to determine if your students are, in fact, paying attention.
As an educator, your success is mediated by the functioning of your students’ cognitive skills, as they rely upon these to learn the material. Attention, the ability to direct and maintain focus for a given period of time while ignoring distractions, is one of the core cognitive skills. The cognitive skills can form a complex web of interconnected dependencies, many of which can affect attention or depend on our ability to pay attention. Unfortunately, while students are often told to “pay attention,” they are rarely taught how to do so. Furthermore, keeping students’ attention is critical because inattentiveness can lead to poor learning outcomes, disinterest in learning, and misdiagnosis.
Therefore, as an educator, it is crucial to know how to gain your students’ attention, how to keep your students’ attention, and how to determine if your students are, in fact, paying attention. Without paying attention, students can sabotage their brain’s ability to capture and transmit information for problem-solving or to adequately retrieve learned information (recall).
Here is where the Science of Learning can be helpful. Research in attention has helped design many strategies to capture and sustain the attention of students. Our neurons serve as an attentional filter which plays a critical role in our learning as information can only be processed and remembered if it makes it through our attentional controls. Teaching strategies to improve attention work by targeting and directing the traffic of information that is processed through the senses. For example, you can identify topics of interest and engage students by creating analogies between those topics and the contents being taught. Still, it is important to keep in mind that in order to make the most out of these techniques it is crucial that educators understand the inner workings of Attention and other cognitive skills, like Processing Speed, Working Memory and Executive Function, among others.
Moreover, it can be useful to try and keep in mind which type of attention your students should apply in each setting. Even though all types of attention are useful and important, each one can have different results depending on the situation we are in. For example, Sustained Attention is great for keeping up with a movie, but if you are driving you’d probably want your Alternating Attention to help you switch between stimuli. When we are learning, two types of attention are helpful and two might inconvenience us. Sustained Attention and Selective Attention, can help students concentrate on a topic for long periods of time and keep focus despite possible distractions. On the other hand, Divided and Alternating Attention make students change focus over and over again, like when they try to study while listening to music. Activities that overly stimulate these two types of attention are part of the reason why attention spans are getting shorter, and we are becoming more inattentive.
Do you struggle to effective capture student attention?
Our Program, Developing Sophisticated Learners is recommended for education professionals who want to have a better understanding of how student processing skills and.....
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