Humans cannot process everything they experience at once, and if it is not processed it cannot be learned.
What percentage of time during a lecture do you think students are paying attention?
The fact is you don’t have (much of) their attention. Observational and student self-report studies suggest that during lectures, college students are paying attention 40-65% of the time.
Ever feel like you are always having to repeat yourself?
One reason is the percentage of time students are paying attention. A second reason is that retaining information, even when paying attention, is a really hard thing to do by itself. In fact, testing immediately following a 50 minute lecture suggests retention rates of 40-50%. More so, as the length of a lecture increases, attentional lapses become more frequent and as a result, the proportion of material remembered decreases further.
If paying attention is so difficult, and retrieval of information even harder, what’s to be done?
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Manipulate factors that you can influence to increase attention. There are four documented factors that impact how a learner pays attention: arousal, interest, fluency, and enjoyment. Identify ways to generate and facilitate these (mostly) intrinsic motivators, and student attention during class should increase accordingly.
- Break up the lecture to help students re-focus. Not only does a change of pace allow students to re-start their attention clock which is on a ~15-20 minute attention curve, but attention can increase somewhat dramatically by utilizing other pedagogies in addition to lecture in balanced ways. Student reports of attention during discussion are ~75%, and during problem solving ~85%. If that wasn’t enough good news to compel a balanced pedagogical approach, there is evidence of increased focus during lecture immediately following such a change-up. Consider how a balanced pedagogical approach that draws on formative assessment could enrich student learning in a course. Tools like a muddiest point question, minute paper, clickers, and think-pair-share are just a few examples of how a formative assessment could help break-up a lecture, allow students to re-focus and pay better attention, reinforce retrieval and learning, and possibly serve as jumping off points to drive a discussion or problem solving activity.
*content on this page was adapted from the Teaching Excellence Colloquium workshop "How Students Learn", by Chelan Huddleston (College of Letters and Science)