by Duncan Jeffries
The way children consume information has changed dramatically, but how is this affecting teaching? Duncan Jefferies explores
A growing number of books, including The Shallows, argue that the internet and digital gadgets are making it harder for us to concentrate. The Pew Research Centre in America recently surveyed almost 2,500 teachers and found that 77% thought that the internet had a “mostly positive” impact on students’ research work, while 87% felt modern technologies were creating an “easily distracted generation with short attention spans”.
But could this simply be the latest variation of ‘the Elvis Hypothesis’ – because something is new, popular with young people, and challenges existing hierarchies and traditions, it must be bad?
Although some UK teachers might be inclined to agree with their American counterparts when faced with a class of restless smartphone-enabled year 10s, there appears to be no conclusive evidence that pupil attention spans are declining.
Sue Honoré, an independent learning consultant who co-authored the 2009 report ‘Generation Y: Inside Out‘ with Dr. Carina Paine Schofield, feels that there is still “a big question about how technology is impacting on the way we behave”. She studied the behaviours of people born between 1982 and 2002 – particularly how they learn and work – and found “mixed results” in terms of attention spans.
While young people are “undoubtedly capable of long periods of concentration”, those who spend a lot of time alone using technology “tend to have less in the way of communication skills, self-awareness and emotional intelligence.” She adds: “That’s not because they don’t have the capabilities. But because they are spending so much time communicating remotely with people rather than face-to-face, when they come into situations where they have to work with others, they appear not to concentrate on people.”
Another recent study carried out by Dr Karina Linnell in the department of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, examined the effects of urbanisation on the attention spans of the Himba, a remote Namibian tribe. A group of Himba who lived a traditional existence in the open bush were compared with a group who had moved to a nearby town, and the ‘urbanised’ British research team.
“We tested them on selective attention tasks like driving or listening to a teacher in class – the traditional mode of delivery, where you need to pay attention to one stream of information and ignore any distractions,” she says. While the urbanised Himba group were roughly comparable to the researchers in terms of their attention spans, Dr Linnell was “staggered” by how good the traditional Himba were at concentrating on one activity for long periods.
She argues it is “intuitively reasonable” to suggest that this has something to do with the level of stimulation inherent in the groups’ everyday environments: low in the case of the traditional Himba, and relatively high in the case of the urbanised group and research team. “Obviously you need to be awake to a certain extent, you need to be aroused to do something that’s demanding. But there comes a limit: one can be so aroused that one’s ability to do a task, or concentrate, begins to fall off.”
Although the study focused on urban environments, few would contradict that children today are growing up in a hyper-stimulating world. So could this be making it difficult for some pupils to concentrate in traditional chalk-and-talk lesson?
At Coventry’s Bablake School, Mark Woodward, head of careers, uses Ted-Ed videos and social media to engage pupils. He describes himself as a “great advocate of embracing new technology and preparing pupils for the digital world”. John Watson, headmaster at the school, says that the internet provides research opportunities that are “quite incredible”, but conceded that “students can be less tenacious if the answer isn’t a few clicks away; they want instant gratification.”
Some teachers at the school expressed concerns that pupils’ over-reliance on the internet for answers often came at the expense of more in-depth research. Honoré’s Generation Y research also highlighted this: ” … vast factual information does not have to be retained any more, the worry is that Gen Y may have inadvertently gone to the other extreme and be missing deeper understanding.”
Darren Northcott, national official for education at the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT), stresses that “technology, used appropriately, can have a very powerful impact on children’s learning. It can really help them make progress that they wouldn’t otherwise have made.”
Nevertheless, in a survey of more than 8,000 members carried out by NASUWT, 46% of respondents said mobile phones were a distraction in class. Ian Fenn, headteacher at Burnage Media Arts College in Manchester, agrees. His school banned mobile phones around eighteen months ago. Fenn says phones were being used in class for “playing games, BBMing [BlackBerry Messenger – a messaging service popular with teenagers], and doing anything other than listening to the teacher.”
Pupils can still bring them to school but must switch them off when they arrive in the morning. If caught using their phone during the day, they must surrender it immediately. Fenn claims the ban has been “enforced and respected by the kids”, though some pupils have been caught secretly using their phones in the toilets.
Although the school won’t be conducting a detailed analysis of how it has affected attention spans, “anecdotally, everyone is telling me, kids included, that the quality of teaching and learning has improved exponentially.” Fenn also says he approaches new digital tool, such as the iPad, with an open mind, but will not allow pupils to use them in school unless there is real evidence that it will give them “an edge, an advantage” and improve their learning.
More research is needed on the links between technology and learning. Ultimately, says José Picardo, head of modern foreign languages at Nottingham High School and an adviser on using emerging technologies in the classroom, the way children consume information has changed and teaching needs to catch up much more quickly. “There are a lot more input sources for children. They can get their information from a variety of places these days, and then we expect them to come to school and enter an alternative reality in which none of things they’re accustomed to using actually exist. There is a disconnect between their expectations and what they actually get. And then we blame them for not being engaged.”
genebalaba 