TOLEDO, Ohio — William Werner’s first-grade class was squirming.
Some of her students at McKinley STEAM Academy were still finishing their reading assignments one morning last month, while others, who had long since finished, were building pyramids with red cups, putting together puzzles and playing with Legos. With each passing minute, the volume in the room increased.
Werner has some tips for times like this – what teachers call “brain breaks.”
“Give me 10,” he told the students. The first graders rushed to do 10 jumping jacks, laughing and jumping up and down. Brain breaks, which typically involve short bursts of activity, are one of the strategies Werner uses when he notices a critical mass of students quickly losing focus.
“Their attention span is short,” Werner said. “However they get up and move, reset their brain so they can sit and focus for a few extra minutes.”
In recent years, educators say it has been more difficult to get students to pay attention. Eighty-eight percent of respondents in one international investigation of more than 3,000 teachers believed their students’ attention span was decreasing. In a study published last year of kindergarten through second-grade classrooms in the United States, 75 percent of teachers said attention spans have declined since the Covid pandemic, when the use of laptops and technology for school spread rapidly.
A growing body of research indicates that excessive consumption screen time and quickly, short content like TikTok videos are part of the problem. At least 36 statesincluding Ohio, have laws requiring schools to ban cell phones in one form or another. There is some debate over whether screen time reduces people’s ability to concentrate or their desire to do so – many development experts lean towards the latter, suggesting that it is possible to help students regain a longer attention span.
To cope and remedy a shorter attention span, educators are employing a list of new and old strategies, including brain breaks; limit time spent in front of a screen; reduce the time students spend on an activity; adding more engaging hands-on projects and meditation.
Some teachers say these efforts are helping, at least a little.
“For the six and a half hours a day we see our babies here, we can’t cancel out all the other distractions that are out there,” said Andrea Bennett, an instructional coach at McKinley STEAM, a K-8 public school.
Still, educators notice that because of tactics aimed at improving attention span, students don’t pick up their phones during class time and, sometimes, they actually get dragged into lessons, Bennett said.
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A key to solving the attention span problem is recognizing that the amount of time students spend on a subject affects their ability to remember it, said Emily Elliott, a psychology professor at Louisiana State University who studies the development of memory and attention. Long-term memorization of information requires repeated attention over time. This is why cramming the day before a test may be effective for memorizing information the next morning, but not for remembering it weeks, or even days, into the future.
“Our memories take time to consolidate,” Elliott said. “The more you’re exposed to something, you learn it, you have to try to remember it. You practice retrieving it, then you take a break. Then you do something else and come back and try again. That strengthens your neural network.”
At McKinley STEAM, one of a growing number of schools nationwide where students are not allowed to have cell phones, Laurel Daniels’ computer science students begin each class with a group discussion. Daniels breaks her 45-minute lessons into smaller chunks, called microlessons, which she says keep them focused. And if a lesson doesn’t work the first time, Daniels sometimes repeats it in a different format.
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“Having such easy access to technology is detrimental to our students,” she said. “They don’t have what I call the ‘productive struggle’. So we have to build that as teachers,” Daniels said.
To engage students, teachers say they often feel the need to deliver instruction not only in shorter periods of time, but also in a more entertaining way.
“The new word is ‘edutainment,'” said Curtis Finch, superintendent of Arizona’s Deer Valley Unified School District. “How can you make your lesson applicable and interactive? Teachers are going to have to be more engaging with students.”
In a fifth-grade science class at McKinley STEAM, students put away their desks and formed a large circle in the middle of the classroom, circling around the teacher. McKinley fifth graders struggled to differentiate between the Earth’s “rotation” and “revolution” around the sun, Bennett said.
Moving around the room with her classmates, the lesson stuck in fifth-grader Nyilah Carter’s mind the next day.
“The rotation is light and nightly, and it takes 24 hours,” Carter recited. “The revolution lasts about a year – 365 and a quarter days. »
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Entertaining physical activities can keep students’ brains engaged, said Elliott, a psychology professor at LSU.
“It was believed for a long time that if you learned visually, you could only learn visually, and that’s really not accurate,” Elliott said. “What’s true is that our brains are busy using all of this all the time,” she said.
In an eighth-grade science class at McKinley STEAM, students split into groups to use marshmallows and candy for a lesson on genetics. Based on the traits assigned to the parents, students were supposed to determine which traits the baby marshmallows possessed: red Twizzler licorice for hair, blue M&M for eyes.
“I noticed some people were eating their kids without permission,” teacher Colleen Dezsi shouted.
The activity was a respite for most of the students, who had spent the previous day taking computer-based tests for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a standardized exam administered every two years to a representative sample of eighth graders across the country.
Working in groups with classmates is the kind of class student Mia Taylor says she enjoys the most. During lessons where the teacher speaks in front of the class, Taylor said she can probably pay attention for about 20 minutes.
“And then I lose interest,” Taylor said. “I think it helps the students a lot if we start doing an activity afterwards. »
Another strategy for rallying students is to be transparent with them, Elliott said. Tell them how much time they will need to spend doing something difficult and why they are doing it, and let them know when they can do something else. They need to know that they can focus on difficult things and they will come out better for it.
In a McKinley STEAM kindergarten class, students start the day with a meditation. The class of two dozen children is perhaps the quietest during this short activity each morning. Imagine you’re in the Arctic, a voice from a meditation video tells them, with snowflakes melting on your skin. In silence, the children lie down on the carpet and close their eyes for a moment. After the meditation, students gather in a circle and do some deep breathing exercises before taking turns proclaiming what they are capable of each day.
“I can be a good student,” one little boy said before the child next to him responded, “I can listen to the teacher.” »
The goal is for these mantras to stay with children hours later when they have to go through the day’s most tedious lessons. Students should be empowered, even at a young age, to know that they can, and sometimes should, do boring things, Elliott said.
“Learning should be fun. You get new information that teaches you how to solve puzzles that you can use for the rest of your life, and that’s amazing,” Elliott said. “But will every second be fun? No. And that’s just the truth.”
Contact Signal writer Ariel Gilreath at arielgilreath.46 or gilreath@hechingerreport.org.
This story about attention span was produced by The Hechinger reportan independent, nonprofit news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Register for the Hechinger newsletter.
The article Tricks Teachers Try to Fix Students’ Shortened Attention Spans appeared first on The Hechinger Report.
