In recent years, educators say it is more challenging to get students to pay attention, according to an article in The Hechinger Report. Eighty-eight percent of respondents in an international survey of more than 3,000 teachers believed their students’ attention spans were getting shorter. In a study published last year covering kindergarten through second grade classrooms in the U.S., 75 percent of teachers said attention spans had dropped since the Covid pandemic, when the use of laptops and technology for schooling spread rapidly.
Excessive screen time and fast, short-form content like TikTok videos are part of the problem, according to research. Whether screen time reduces people’s ability to focus or their desire to is currently being debated. Many developmental experts lean toward the latter, suggesting it is possible to help students regain longer attention spans.
Educators are employing new and old strategies to cope with and remedy shorter attention spans including brain breaks; limiting screen time; cutting the time students spend on one activity; adding more engaging hands-on projects and meditation.
Educators are noticing that as a result of tactics to improve attention spans, students aren’t reaching for their phones during class time and, sometimes, they get drawn into lessons, says Andrea Bennett, an instructional coach at McKinley STEAM, a K-8 public school.
A key to fixing the attention span problem is recognizing that the amount of time students focus on a topic affects their ability to remember it, says Emily Elliott, a Louisiana State University professor of psychology who studies the development of memory and attention. Remembering information long-term requires repeated attention over time — it’s why cramming the night before a test might work to remember the information the next morning, but not for remembering it weeks, or even days, into the future.
“Our memories take time to consolidate,” Elliott says. “The more times that you are exposed to something, you learn it, you have to try to remember it. You practice retrieving it, and then you have a break. Then you do something else and come back and try again. That’s strengthening your neural network.”
To engage students, teachers say they often feel the need to deliver teaching not only in shorter bursts, but also in more entertaining ways.
“The new word is ‘edutainment,’” says Curtis Finch, superintendent of Deer Valley Unified School District in Arizona. “How can you make your lesson applicable, interactive? Teachers are going to have to be more engaging for students.”
In a fifth grade science class at McKinley STEAM, students cleared away their desks and walked in a big circle in the middle of the classroom, spinning around the teacher. McKinley’s fifth grade students have had a hard time distinguishing the difference between the Earth’s “rotation” and “revolution” around the sun, Bennett says.
Entertaining, physical activities can keep students’ brains engaged, says Elliott, the LSU psychology professor.
“There was this belief for a long time that if you were a visual learner, you could only learn visually, and that’s really not accurate,” says Elliott. “What is accurate is our brains are busy using all of it all of the time,” she says.
Be transparent with students, says Elliott. Tell them the amount of time they will have to spend doing something hard and why they’re doing it, and let them know when they can do something else. They should know that they can focus on hard things and that they will be better for it.
In a kindergarten classroom at McKinley STEAM, students start the day with a meditation. The classroom of two dozen children is perhaps its quietest during this short activity every morning. Imagine you’re in the Arctic, a voice from a meditation video tells them, with snowflakes melting on your skin. Silently, the children lay down on the carpet and close their eyes for a moment. After the meditation, the students gather in a circle and do a few deep breathing exercises before taking turns proclaiming what they are capable of each day.
The goal is that meditation mantras will stay with the children hours later, when they have to sit through the more tedious lessons of the day. Students should be empowered, even at a young age, to know they can, and sometimes must, do things that are boring, Elliott says.
“Learning should be fun. You are getting new information that is teaching you how to solve puzzles that you can use for the rest of your life, and that’s amazing,” says Elliott. “But is every second of it going to be fun? No. And that’s just the truth.”
The Hechinger Report
