How to Focus for Learning

Introduction

Keeping attention refers to a focusing activity and a state of mental alertness. Once in that state, the mind does not engage in unnecessary details. The individual can learn and choose information. Attention is a catalyst to initiate learning.

Research has shown that people who have a high ability to focus share the characteristics of thinking critically and creatively. However, it is not always feasible to be aware of everything at the same time. This is especially true in the school setting where students need to focus on various ways the speed and information of material is presented. In order for students have to be able to see the main issue in a problem, understand the problem and to develop ideas they need to be focused.

Student will expend a high amount of cognitive effort to keep their attention for a long period of time. Part of keeping focused means preventing distractions from taking their attention away from the learning process. This can be particularly hard in a digital world. The more attention and focus on learning, the greater the knowledge will be. In addition, increased concentration during the learning process leads to a decreased chance of losing or forgetting the presented material. .

Environment

The efficiency of learning can be affected by the environment or atmosphere. To have a conductive learning environment, the learning place should be quiet and not easily disturbed by external stimuli. However, even under the best conditions, the individual themselves can find their mind wandering to other things other than learning. Setting up a conducive environment is has been proven as a positive factor to affect concentration. Increased concentration leads to increased learning.

An effective learning environment comprises:

• condition of school buildings
• teacher-student relationships
• student facilitaties
• upright seating (not a reclined seat)
• quiet atmosphere
• right amount of students per room (not too crowded)

Active learning

There is ample evidence that teaching methods that include some form of active learning (e.g., think–pair–share, group discussions) can produce superior learning gains compared with lecture-only teaching methods (e.g., Freeman , 2014). But how? And why does the impact of active learning appear to vary across classrooms and instructors? Although there has been relatively little research investigating the mechanisms leading to active-learning outcomes, some potential hypotheses have been offered. One possibility is that instructors act as “cognitive coaches” during active learning, structuring opportunities for exploration, confusion, and resolution that directly lead to more student learning in class. Another possibility is that active-learning classrooms provide more opportunities for social interaction among students that could result in increased social networks among students and indirectly more out-of-class learning. Like most complex phenomena, the underlying mechanisms of the positive effects of active-learning strategies are likely multiple, involving both of these ideas and many more.

Technology and learning

. Technology increasingly impacts on the ways in which people acquire, update, and correct their understanding. The emergence of mobile networked devices now means that information can be accessed anywhere, anytime with a connection to the Internet. This new information reality has created substantial affordances for learning both in formal education and in informal settings. These opportunities have seemingly not come without a cost. Many scholars and commentators [e.g. 1-3] argue that the ease with which we can now access information is negatively and persistently impacting our capacity to learn, understand, and interact with others. In particular, attention is implicated as a key factor in the apparent negative influence of technology on learning in the digital age.he cognitive ability to allocate our attention selectively allows us to prioritize only some elements of the environment while filtering out others henomenon, selectively attending to only a single auditory source amongst many, demonstrates the cognitive capacity to voluntarily filter information according to our internal goals. In some cases, however, our attention is captured involuntarily although attention can greatly focus our thoughts and actions on only some aspects of our environment, the ways in which we allocate our attention depend on both our internal goals as well as external factors.It has voluntary and involuntary components and can be influenced by factors such as interest, motivation, and self-regulation.

negative effects of multitasking

Negative outcomes of distracted learning1. Learning tasks take longer to complete because of the time spent on distracting activities and because, upon returning to theassignment, the student has to refamiliarize him/herself with the material.2. Mental fatigue caused by switching back and forth between tasks. The cognitive cost is especially high when alternating between tasksthat call for different sets of demands, such as the formal, precise language required for an English essay and the casual, friendly tone ofa text message to a friend.3. If attention is divided during the encoding process, the student’s subsequent memory (long term retention) of what he/she worked onwill be impaired. Impairment can also extends to nearby peers.4. When a student is distracted during learning, his/her brain actually processes and stores information in different, less useful ways,resulting in knowledge that is much less adept at extending and extrapolating to new contexts (decreased transfer).5. Off-task media multitasking while learning is negatively associated with student performance (i.e., grades, GPa). True multitasking can only occur if the two tasks at hand are very simple and do not compete with each other for the same mental resource. when most people refer to multitasking, they are actually talking about switch-tasking (also called task-switching), that is, attempting to do multiple attention-requiring tasks at the same time. The bad news is that switching, even rapidly, between two or more tasks is just not very efficient or effective, it actually damages productivity and relationships (Cren

Types of attention

Many types of attention are occurring in classrooms all the time, and fluctuations between external attention (e.g., on the instructor’s voice) and internal attention (e.g., connecting new material to prior knowledge) may be more beneficial for learning than we might have assumed. Here, we describe a frame

. As such, we have chosen to focus on two key dimensions that readily delineate attention in the classroom: 1) internal/external attention (Chun et al., 2011), and 2) on-topic/off-topic attention, each of which is described below (see Figure 1).xternal attention, often referred to as perceptual attention, is described by Chun et al. (2011) as the selection and modulation of sensory information. When you stare out into a crowded city street looking for a taxi, your brain is able to filter out irrelevant information and heighten your focus on large, yellow, moving objects to reach your goal. Research on external attention has shown that the brain has methods of both boosting signals representing relevant information and suppressing signals representing irrelevant information, functions that are critical for navigating our crowded, complex environments. Only a tiny portion of what our eyes see in the world is actually consciously perceived by our brains, and without this ability to filter sensory information, we may be unable to focus on what is important amid sensory overload. In contrast to external attention, internal attention is described as the selection and modulation of internally generated information, such as the contents of memory. While external attention allows us to sample new sensory information from the environment, internal attention lets us process information even in the absence of sensory stimuli. For example, even without looking at the text on this page, you could be thinking about this new concept of internal attention, perhaps recalling memories of your own experiences in the classroom or coming up with a mnemonic device to help you remember this taxonomy.attention can be directed toward course-relevant (on-topic) information or not-course-relevant (off-topic) information. In most cases, the distinction between on-topic and off-topic attention is relatively clear. For example, examining a diagram on a handout would be considered on-topic attention, while making a mental list of groceries would be considered off-topic attention. However, there may be other scenarios in which the distinction between on- and off-topic attention is less clear, such as when a student recalls information learned in another course that might lead to the realization of important cross-disciplinary connections. Moreover, defining a particular internal thought or external stimulus as on- or off-topic may depend on one’s perspective as student or instructor. For our purposes, we will consider more overt examples of on-topic attention that are directly tied to content learning, while acknowledging that many forms of non–content related attention may still be important and in the service of student learning (e.g., an instructor talking about his or her pathway into science).

On-Topic External Attention

When you notice a student with eye gaze locked on your PowerPoint slides, nodding occasionally, posture maintained, you may feel a sense of relief and assume that this student is clearly “paying attention” in the colloquial sense. One might assume that this student is the most engaged and the most likely to retain the information being conveyed, as he or she portrays the ways we have been socialized to show that we are engaged. Certainly, by focusing eye gaze on slides and listening actively to an instructor’s voice, one might maximize the brain’s ability to take in new information. But is it always the case that this is most beneficial for learning? Perhaps our assumption that eye contact is a natural and comfortable way to engage attentively does not hold for all students equally.

Cognitive science research on memory and attention suggests that diligently going through lecture slides and rereading material over and over the night before an exam may allow for short-term recall but does not foster long-term memory or understanding (Capeda et al., 2006). Instead, deeper processing of the material, tying new material to prior knowledge, and actively retrieving information from memory seem to be more effective for long-term learning. Perhaps, then, external on-topic attention in the classroom is necessary but not sufficient for effective learning. This may provide some explanation for why lecture yields inferior learning compared with even the most modest active-learning approaches (Freeman et al., 2014). If so, then it makes sense to balance out pedagogical techniques that emphasize external attention (lecture slides, videos, etc.) with other techniques, as discussed in the section On-Topic Internal Attention.

On-Topic Internal Attention

Thinking beyond the idea of “paying attention” and trying to understand, in particular, what students are “paying attention to” may allow us to better conceptualize what is happening in students’ brains during a class session as they form complex networks of understanding. When a student’s gaze drifts away from the lecture slides, it is not necessarily the case that the students’ attention is now off-topic. On the contrary, it seems likely that moments of prompted quiet thinking time are beneficial for learning (Owens et al., 2017).

Evidence supporting this idea comes readily from research demonstrating the utility of active-learning practices in the classroom (Tanner, 2013; Johnson et al., 1991, 1998; Goodwin et al., 1991), particularly those that allow students a chance to think, digest new information, identify their confusions, or connect new concepts with what is already known. For example, the “think” phase of a think–pair–share activity is likely crucial to allow students to contemplate the question at hand before discussing with their colleagues. These forms of on-topic, internally focused attention are perhaps just as important for learning as on-topic, externally focused attention. Additionally, on-topic internal attention can allow students the chance to practice metacognition, that is, reflecting on their own thinking and learning (Tanner, 2012).

Off-Topic External Attention

A clock ticks, a pencil taps, a truck starts blaring its backup signal outside. All sorts of external stimuli can grab our attention automatically, often beyond our ability to control it. Amid so many possible distractions, it is actually astonishing that our brains are able to maintain focus on goal-relevant information (e.g., listening to an instructor’s voice). Usefully, this ability to focus does not prevent us from noticing the sudden appearance of potentially threatening information. The classic example used is that of a hunter-gatherer searching for tiny berries in a bush. To survive effectively, the searcher must maintain sharp focus on the goal-relevant information (round red objects) but not so focused that they do not notice the preying tiger. For students in a classroom, the threat of tigers may not be so dire, but sudden noises or changes in environmental stimuli could be indicative of useful information that is worth a shift in attention.

Recent work shows that four times every second our brains shift between a state of sharp focus and a state of broad awareness of our surroundings (Fiebelkorn et al., 2018; Fiebelkorn and Kastner, 2019). We obviously do not consciously switch our attention to new external stimuli that frequently, but our brains do seem to give us the option to switch attention that often, a capability that likely evolved under evolutionary pressures to stay alert while maintaining what feels to us like continuous, steady focus. In the classroom, there may be ways that we can optimize on-topic attention by continuously drawing attention back to the material when distractions arise (for more on shifting attention, see How Instructors May Leverage Attention).

Off-Topic Internal Attention

Similarly to how loud noises can draw our attention externally, salient internal experiences can draw attention internally. Suppose a student has a family member in the hospital for surgery today. As much as the student tries to volitionally direct attention toward a lecture slide or worksheet, the student’s attention may be drawn back to the topic of his or her family member repeatedly over the course of the class session. Sometimes, off-topic thoughts, worries, or ruminations take priority over on-topic information, and our brains are well adapted to redirect our focus toward those high-priority thoughts. Maybe the student who appears to be “zoning out” is actually rehearsing material for another course, or stressed about an exam next period. Off-topic, internal attention can come from many sources and can be difficult to identify or act upon.

As noted before, mind-wandering makes up a substantial part of our day-to-day lives. Off-topic mind-wandering may sometimes be distracting, resulting in poorer task performance, decreased learning, lower grade point average, poorer memory for lecture material, and less motivation to learn (Risko et al., 2012; Randall et al., 2014; Wammes et al., 2016; Unsworth and McMillan, 2017). However, off-topic mind-wandering could potentially provide a useful source of material for more creative thinking and reflection, perhaps allowing students to bring new ideas and perspectives to the topic at hand. It is important to note that studies have investigated both intentional and unintentional mind-wandering (Robison et al., 2020), because these off-topic thoughts may not always be under conscious control. By understanding the ubiquity of mind-wandering in the classroom, one can think more carefully about the many possible ways to guide students’ attention in the classroom, as discussed in How Instructors May Leverage Attention.

One well-documented source of impaired performance in the classroom (Shih et al., 1999) is stereotype threat, which occurs when one is at risk of confirming a negative stereotype about one’s social group (Steele and Aronson, 1995). Recent theories have posited that stereotype threat yields under performance by sapping working memory resources. Put another way, stereotype threat may redirect internal attention from on-topic (considering the material) to off-topic (considering one’s identity, abilities, and social environment), making it more challenging to perform the task at hand (Pennington et al., 2016). By understanding the ways that implicit or explicit biases can affect students’ attention, we can develop better strategies for reducing these influences.