Some good quotes from Clifford Nass:

“It seemed as though they could actually do two things at once. What do these kids know that I don’t? It drove me crazy. That’s what inspired my research.”

But he found that “they’re not amazing. They can’t really do it.” His research shows that the students’ memories were disorganised; they fixated on irrelevant data, could not follow specific directions that required paying attention and wrote poorly.

… “We’ve reached a period where attention is no longer valued. There’s been a cultural change where we’ve forgotten about the idea of paying attention,” he says. “And people have started to resent that.”

I haven’t banned laptops from my own lectures – indeed, only small numbers of students bring laptops to lectures at UWS, so it hasn’t really been a major issue. In some classes I’ve given out laptops – but that has been to allow students to do practical work at set points in a class (its hard to teach programming in a lecture). I have this year used mobile phone based response/poll systems in class and that did work well – using the technology to concentrate attention on the task, without allowing it to become a distraction seems to be key.

Sherry Turkle makes a very worthwhile point:

But what professors are learning to say is: ‘You know what? In this class we’re here to be with each other. We’re here to be a community. Let’s make the most of it.’

There are of course two sides to this – lecturers need to do their part to engage students and to try to promote learning – and students need to learn how best to help themselves and understand the negative impacts of partial attention.

(See some of the other posts here on multi-tasking for links to other studies)

In short, as more lecture halls and class rooms are set up for wireless, more and more students are using their laptops in the lecture hall. But they aren’t necessarily using them for taking notes, following up class related links or similar. No, they are more likely to be checking out MySpace pages, IM’ing friends or playing The Sims. Or buying shoes on eBay. And anecdotal evidence supports the common-sense assumption that this leads to poorer learning outcomes…

Cynthia M. Frisby, associate professor of strategic communication at the University of Missouri, has noticed students on MySpace and eBay during her lectures. She has also noticed more failing grades. The final straw, she says, came in an e-mail from a student “complimenting my outfit, failing to realize that the time stamp was on the e-mail, further suggesting that he was not paying attention to my lecture.”

Now she bans laptops in her large lecture courses and has a clause in her syllabus about the inappropriate use of technology. The result? “Huge increases in attention and better performance on exams,” she says. “Students have even mentioned that they feel like they are doing better without the laptop.”

This is not too different from my own experience. About 6 years ago I found someone playing ‘Snake’ on his mobile phone in my classroom. I have to admit that I was completely taken aback with that. When one student is using a laptop, and other students around are drawn to the screen, I know it isn’t being used for notes…

The article also include quotes with a very familiar feel to anyone who has read Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” – or any of the numerous posts on this blog where I refer to it:

Adams cites a 1972 work by Eda LeShan on “The Sesame Street Syndrome.” She argued that, by overemphasizing the idea of right and wrong answers, the show taught children that thinking and questions are irrelevant because adults do the asking and answering. Nowadays, the syndrome “has come to describe students who expect to be entertained as they learn,” Adams wrote, adding: “If the entertainment doesn’t come from the front of the wireless classroom, it comes from the Internet.”

The article also includes some coping methods – such as allowing laptops but asking students to close them when there is a point needing emphasis. Somewhat deeper are comments on the philosophy of a technology led education system… e.g.:

“We should be teaching our students to think creatively or to become innovators, not just test takers,” he says.

That goal is increasingly difficult to attain. We deal with legislatures holding school districts “accountable” through multiple-choice testing as they cut budgets to higher education, resulting in ever-larger classes where digital distractions are most common and where we rely again on computer-graded bubble tests emphasizing right answers rather than process.

I could easily pick three or four more quotable paragraphs, but I’ll leave it there.

It is extremely unlikely that banning technologies from the classroom is going to be a viable long-term solution for the problems of distraction – so we need to develop more strategies for coping, and to better educate our students on how to use technology productively.

 Pupils who have worked with creative people such as writers and fashion designers are more punctual, better behaved and work better, Ofsted says.

Well what if it turned out there were ways of improving childrens attention at school without any need to convert the curriculum into a series of digital games? If instead of pandering to the need for constant visual stimulation, it were possible to help children learn the discipline required for concentrating, listening and thinking without flashy graphics? It appears that there may be one fairly simple solution that can lead to dramatic improvements: it’s called food.

A lot has been written about diet and behaviour, and I’m not about to review it. That would take too long – but the effects of diet on concentration are known. It is also known that much of the modern diet that many children are fed – often in schools themselves – can contribute to behavioural problems. Then there are other subtle effects from where children and parents don’t spend time at a table to eat breakfast and dinner together. Joanna Blythman’s book Bad Food Britain has a few chapters on this.

A practical solution for schools? Breakfast clubs. My wife found an article in the October issue of She – an interview with Carmel McConnell, the founder of the Magic Breakfast charity which provides free breakfasts to schools around London. A couple of snippets from the interview:

“…five primary school head teachers who all told the same story – that many pupils arrived too hungry to concentrate.”

“Staff… have told me it has made a real difference – the kids are more settled, pay more attention, and exam results are improving.”