Focus! Helping Students Understand Distraction

James Lang’s book, Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It offers useful context around ideas about distraction and tips on how to understand it, educate around it, and manage it. Lang notes “The difference between us and our nineteenth-century cousins is not that our attention capacities have somehow been permanently diminished, as Carr would have it, but that people and devices that seek out attention have become better at soliciting it from us” (pg. 48). Lang urges us to “cultivate attention” rather than “prevent distraction,” and argues that supporting students to understand the nature of distraction and the ways in which their devices leverage the understanding of distraction can be helpful; below are a few ideas from Lang on how to do this.

Bringing awareness to the nature of our distractions

Supporting students to make sense of the learning process helps them learn. Lang maps out the necessity of grasping students’ attention because it “precedes and underpins the kind of cognitive work we expect students to undertake” (pg. 46). Students are not always aware of how distracted they can be in class. One way of combating this is to help them recognize attention as an important part of the learning process – sharing this process with students can help to refocus them on being mindful about where their attention is.

Attention & Learning

To learn something, we must first pay attention to it, then process it (think of the Piagetian notion of schema) and then be able to retrieve it. If we are not paying attention, or our attention is divided; we cannot stimulate the learning process as effectively as we like. Most students can relate to this – think about all the times we’ve read a passage and then had to read it again.

Ask students to participate in an experiment in class – (a) give out a post-it note and a pen; (b) ask students to put their phones in their bag for 15 minutes; (c) go about class as you normally would for 15 minutes; (d) ask students to put a tally on the post-in note every time they habitually think about or motion as if they’d check their phone. Collect the post-its, ask students to estimate the average, and then share the data with your class. Alternately, you could use an online poll to ask students to respond to the prompt: “Are you good at multi-tasking? YES/NO/SOMETIMES.” You can then share with the class the following ideas about learning and multi-tasking.

Multi-Tasking

Lang explains what neuroscience research tells us about multi-tasking: “When a task or activity becomes familiar to us and requires little thought, we can effectively pair it with unrelated tasks. …If both tasks require your attention, or if they operate in similar regions of the brain — such as attempting to read while someone speaks to you, which both involve language — then the limited capacity of our attention interferes with our apprehension and processing” (pg. 48). One of the reasons I really like this explanation is that it holds true the idea that there are times when multi-tasking works – we can watch tv and fold laundry or unload the dishwasher and listen to the radio. But when it comes to learning new information, it’s challenging to have divided attention.

With this new information, and data on the level of distraction in your classroom, it’s a good time to ask each student to share their plan for how they will minimize distraction in your class and outside of the classroom as they prepare assignments for class. It’s also a good time to ask what you can do as a professor to keep their attention in class – what kinds of activities and topics are most engaging for your students?