Attention Spans in Education - Are we facing a crisis!

If you genuinely read this article to the end please add your name to the comments section...

Can we really capture the truth in 140 syllables? The USA has a president who prefers to communicate by the simplest of media, maybe BECAUSE he understands that the youth of today have limited attention spans... and a few characters of reassurance is all that is needed....

Can our students actually understand what we their Tutors are saying? Can our students structure the complex information in a manner within their brains in the way that we ourselves as educators intended?

One of my favourite articles of recent years came from Barry Schwartz is a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, USA, he and many other senior educational providers are worried that students have an inability to focus. Aspects of Barry's argument has been articulated below.. 

" By catering to students with diminished attention spans, we are making a colossal and unconscionable mistake. The world is a complex and subtle place, and efforts to understand it and improve it must match its complexity and subtlety. We are treating as unalterable a characteristic that REALLY can be changed."

Yes, there is no point in publishing a long article if no one will read it to the end. The question is, what does it take to get people to read things to the end?

The key point for teachers and parents to realize is that maintaining attention is a skill. It has to be trained, and it has to be practiced. If we cater to short attention spans by offering materials that can be managed with short attention spans, the skill will not develop. The “attention muscle” will not be exercised and strengthened. Barry suggests "It is as if you complain to a personal trainer about your weak biceps and the trainer tells you not to lift heavy things. Just as we don’t expect people to develop their biceps by lifting two-pound weights, we can’t expect them to develop their attention by reading 140-character tweets, 200-word blog posts, or 300-word newspaper articles.

In other words, the “short-attention” phenomenon is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. First, we tell ourselves that people can’t maintain attention. Second, we do nothing to nurture their ability to maintain attention. And sure enough, we “discover” that people can’t maintain attention.

A person who is my age can read a very brief and oversimplified discussion of a complex issue and note that it is brief and oversimplified. Such a person might even try to go deeper by consulting other sources to gain an understanding. 

But what of a person who has been raised from the crib on short material? (I have family members who qualify as such example) - For these persons, there is no “brief and oversimplified.” There is no experience of “long and complex” to provide them with a contrast. The world has been simplified to watching Youtube clips, and short synopsis articles.

Before long, people stop realizing that they have an intellectual deficiency that needs correction. Oversimplified becomes the only game in town, at which point, it stops being “over” simplified.

If people are fed a steady diet of the oversimple, it can’t help but affect the way they think about things. Before we know it, the complexity and subtlety of the world we inhabit will be invisible to us when we try to make sense of what is going on around us.

In our world of medical education it is often the subtle that informs our diagnosis or reveals the path we should follow.

Perhaps the most vivid example of our lost attention is TED and its famous 18-minute talks.

I’m a huge fan of TED. I think TED is a real gift to the world. Virtually all TED talks are interesting, and many are breathtaking. In Medicine we have Smacc talks and amazing Medical podcasts, But in many of these talks, we have some of the world’s most subtle minds talking about some of the world’s most complex ideas in 18 minutes!

WHY?

At TED events or SMACC events themselves, with live presentations, the simplification can be mitigated by post-talk discussion—with fellow audience members or with the speakers themselves. Some in the audience have questions or see connections or raise problems that have eluded you, and the post-talk interaction that enriches your understanding of the presentation is a key part of the TED / SMACC experience.

But when you watch these talks on your computer, it is just you and those 18 minutes. TED talks have been watched more than 1 billion times. This can’t help but establish a standard for attention and tolerance of complexity that carries over into other parts of life. And the habit of thinking long and hard—of concentrating—gets degraded.

Many college professors have begun incorporating TED talks into their syllabi.

I have shared my own talks with students and tutors, but I have heard my science mis represented and skewed.

Our talks are so cutting edge, and so entertaining, that they are an attractive alternative to, say, an article in an academic journal. But when we as lecturers or professors do this, maybe we miss the opportunity to demand sustained attention from students and to nurture it.

Must we accept the short attention span generation as a  fait accompli and cater to it, or can we reverse a powerful and I think destructive trend?

It would be foolish to expect commercial sources to force complexity on an unwilling public. For them, it’s all about ears, eyeballs, and bottom lines. But there is some reason to hope that noncommercial institutions—especially educational institutions—can help reverse the attention-deficit trend by demanding more of their audiences. 

University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth has shown that perseverance—what she calls “grit”—is a better predictor of academic success than IQ or SAT scores. Grit is about more than sustained attention. It is about responding to challenges by rolling up your sleeves and working harder. But sustained attention is surely a key part of grit. If people don’t keep paying attention to a task, they can hardly be expected to persevere with it.

Most of the existing research on training sustained attention has focused on either mitigating the effects of brain injury or treating kids with ADHD. There are various interventions that have produced measurable positive effects, but one must be careful not to assume that what works to bring pathological cases a little closer to normal will also work with normal cases, especially since the problems with brain-injured and ADHD people are likely mostly cognitive whereas the problems I’m worrying about are probably mostly motivational. When it comes to normal people, there is evidence that training in mindfulness meditation improves sustained attention.

There is also evidence, some of it collected by Duckworth and colleagues, that giving kids not only task goals, but detailed plans for achieving those goals improves sustained attention. And in some schools, they teach first-graders to pay attention by training them to SLANT ( Sit up, Look and Listen to the speaker, Ask questions, Nod, and Track the teacher).

Research on training attention may one day produce a magic bullet. For now, I’d be satisfied if we nurtured sustained attention in the same way your personal trainer builds up your biceps—by gradually demanding more and more of students’ attention muscles in the classroom.

Developing the “sustained attention muscle” should be a central part of education.

Is there any evidence that it is? I fear not, and I think that recent trends are not encouraging. In universities, value is placed on being a popular teacher who commands large enrolments. Our student satisfaction scores...

One doesn’t do that by demanding sustained engagement with difficult material. And MOOCs, whatever their potential cost-saving benefits, enable students to watch presentations in brief snatches, perfect for the attentionally challenged, which in turn pressures instructors to organize their material in matching, bite-sized portions. We all let students bring their laptops into class, which virtually guarantees that they will be shuttling between email and web surfing while occasionally taking notes on what is being said. None of this is a recipe for strengthening the sustained attention muscle.

The world is complex, and it isn’t going to get any simpler.

Unless we can create a population that is capable of thinking about complexity in complex ways, it is highly unlikely that the problems of global warming; economic inequality; access to affordable, high-quality health care; or any of the other challenges the world face will get adequate solutions. Good solutions to any of these problems will be complex, and they will not win support from a population that demands simplicity. Teachers have a responsibility to train complex minds that are suited to a complex world. This is at least as important as teaching young people mathematics, biology, or literature.

For teachers, at all levels, attention must be paid to teaching that attention must be paid.

Barry Schwartz is a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College and author of The Paradox of Choice and Practical Wisdom (with Kenneth Sharpe).