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“Students with short attention spans” Is it an increasing problem in our classrooms ? 

by  Sean Wynne

Students with attention problems often have serious difficulties in school. Inattention, impulsiveness, hyperactivity, disorganization, and other difficulties can lead to unfinished/ incomplete homework, lack of interest in school, careless errors, behaviour which is disruptive, and finally poor examination results.

 The eight key inattention symptoms to look for in my experience are:

Short Attention Span not to be confused with Attention Deficit  Disorder

According to American research a short attention span occurs in thirty per cent to forty per cent of students, most of them males. It is a problem in our schools which few educators wish to discuss, yet off the record most will admit it is a major problem. What are the social, educational, and environmental changes which are leading to the present situation .  A normal attention span is 3 to 5 minutes per year of a child's age is acknowledged as normal. So our Junior Certificate student aged fourteen years should be able to concentrate for over half an hour.  Leaving Certificate  student should have an attention span of three quarter of an hour.  Yet as many thirty per cent of students in my experience have attention spans way below this figure and therefore leads to under performance at examinations. While attention problems was always a problem in our schools the question needs to be asked why is more students finding it more difficult to concentrate and apply themselves in our current educational system.

Characteristics of the problem

A student hasn't learned to listen when someone talks, wait his turn, complete a task, or return to a task if interrupted.  A student who has symptoms of hyperactivity is restless, impulsive, and in a hurry.

It is accepted that up to twenty per cent of students also have a learning disability. The most common learning disability is an auditory processing deficit (that is, they have difficulty remembering verbal directions). However, the intelligence of most children with attention problems is usually normal.

 One question to ask is: Can my students concentrate when they are doing something they love or when they are participating in an activity that truly interests them? If the answer is yes, then we need to find ways to help them stay focussed on tasks that appeal to them less. We might try suggesting that our students work in areas where noise levels or visual distractions are reduced. Or we might search for ways to help our students become more engaged in the learning at hand. One way to do this is to make sure that they understands the purpose of a learning activity and that they feel confident in tackling it. If on the other hand, our student never seems to engage in any activity for more than a few moments, you may want to discuss these concerns with the parents and school management.

So what is the source of the problem –

To much television.

Changing food diet

Play station/ continuously playing games

Computer games

Lack of physical activity, chores at home

Lack of parental control.

Lack of self control.

Lack of interest in school

Poor expectations

Course material not relevant to many students

After school employment

Changing social values

Resistance to learning the main outcome-

Behaviourists seem to believe that people learn only when it worth their while. Humanists seem to believe everyone wants to learn, but learning is a form of personal change, and that can be resisted as often as it is embraced.

Generally speaking, when students fail to learn something which they have been taught, the failure is attributed to one or more of three factors:

My experience, however, suggests a fourth factor which is often neglected:

By "cost" is implied the loss involved for the student in "changing their ways". This change may be termed "supplanting learning (replacement)", to be contrasted with simple "additive learning" in that instead of just adding new knowledge or skills to an existing repertoire, supplanting learning calls into question previous ways of acting or prior knowledge.

Supplanting learning is difficult enough when it is entirely under the learner's control, but when it is required, demanded or forced, or creeps up out of awareness, or there is significant emotional investment in previous beliefs or ways of acting, it becomes problematic .

Expected course of action

Students with attention problems can improve significantly if parents and teachers provide understanding and direction and preserve the students self-esteem and work to improve the situation.  But this takes up considerable amount of school time and while fine in theory is difficult to put in practice. When these students become adults, many of them have reasonable attention spans but remain restless, have to keep busy, and, in a sense, have not entirely outgrown the problem.

Working with the problem

Slow Down and Don't Push Too Fast. When we get up in front of a group of learners we often lose our ability to see how fast we're really going. If we had to err in any one direction it's much better to err on the side of going too slow in our presentation. There's nothing so frustrating for a learner as when he/she sees the content whizzing by at such a fast pace that once a key idea is missed there's no catching up especially if there is attention problems! Slow down, provides lots of examples, create viable opportunities for asking questions, and try and increase the amount of listening that you do. It will help in reducing the learner's resistance to learning and give plenty of short tests to reinforce the material.

 Work at Building Trust. This theme seems to run through so many of the other ideas about reducing resistance to learning. And why? Because it seems to be so central to what we do as an educator. Of course there's no simple recipe for how you build trust with learners. However, without trust the learner is often unwilling to let his/her guard down far enough to allow new learning to occur. When trust is a component to an educational programme the learner is much more willing to let down his/her guard.

 Don't Try too Hard to Persuade. It's easy to take on a learner's resistance to learning as a personal challenge or crusade. Trying to convert someone to your way of thinking and thereby turning them into a willing learner may allow you to "win the battle but loose the war." As an educator, when we stand in front of a group of learners it becomes easy to get caught up in the "rightness" of whatever it is we're teaching.

Acknowledge the Right to Resist Learning. When all else fails it's probably a good idea to let your guard down and acknowledge to the learner that it's okay if he/she doesn't want to learn. There's nothing that says that everyone must learn - especially on your time schedule. The trick, of course, is in creating a viable way to tell this to the learner. You can't do it as if striking out at the learner, "Okay, so you don't want to learn. See if I care!" That's not going to earn you any points with the learner that's resisting or any of the other learners for that matter.

So there you have it. Some rather direct ideas about attention problems in the classroom and how to help students overcome their attention problems and resistance to learning. And, if I'm correct, you experience it in the same way that I do - it pops up when I least expect it and often when I'm least prepared to deal with it. It helps, though, to reflect on it. And that's what this article is intended to do.

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