Student Concentration

This weeks's article summaries focus (pun intended) on the importance of developing concentration skills in students and their significance in student success as adult. Numerous studies have shown that the three variables most predictive of a student's future success as a adult are IQ, effort (which includes the ability to focus and concentrate), and socioeconomic status—and recent studies have shown that effort is the most important of the three.

Clearly in the age of distraction we live in, being more deliberate in teaching kids to concentrate has become even more important in schools.

Enjoy the weekend.

Joe

Age of Distraction: Why It’s Crucial for Students to Learn to Focus

Digital classroom tools like computers, tablets and smartphones offer exciting opportunities to deepen learning through creativity, collaboration and connection, but those very devices can also be distracting to students.

Similarly, parents complain that when students are required to complete homework assignments online, it’s a challenge for students to remain on task.

The ubiquity of digital technology in all realms of life isn’t going away, but if students don’t learn how to concentrate and shut out distractions, research shows they’ll have a much harder time succeeding in almost every area.

“The real message is because attention is under siege more than it has ever been in human history, we have more distractions than everbefore, we have to be more focused on cultivating the skills of attention,” said Daniel Goleman, a psychologist and author of books about social and emotional learning

“I’m particularly worried about children because the brain is the last organ of the body to become anatomically mature. It keeps growing until the mid-20s,” Goleman said. If young students don’t build up the neural circuitry that focused attention requires, they could have problems controlling their emotions and being empathetic.

“It’s about using the devices smartly but having the capacity to concentrate as you need to, when you want to.”

“The circuitry for paying attention is identical for the circuits for managing distressing emotion,” Goleman said. The area of the brain that governs focus and executive functioning is known as the pre-frontal cortex. This is also the part of the brain that allows people to control themselves, to keep emotions in check and to feel empathy for other people.

“The attentional circuitry needs to have the experience of sustained episodes of concentration — reading the text, understanding and listening to what the teacher is saying — in order to build the mental models that create someone who is well educated,” Goleman said. “The pulls away from that mean that we have to become more intentional about teaching kids.” He advocates for a “digital sabbath” everyday, some time when kids aren’t being distracted by devices at all. He’d also like to see schools building exercises that strengthen attention, like mindfulness practices, into the curriculum.

The ability to focus is a secret element to success that often gets ignored. The more you can concentrate the better you’ll do on anything.

The most well known study on concentration is a longitudinal study conducted with over 1,000 children in New Zealand. The study tested children born in 1972 and 1973 regularly for eight years, measuring their ability to pay attention and to ignore distractions. Then, the researchers tracked those same children down at the age of 32 to see how well they faired in life. The ability to concentrate was the strongest predictor of success.

“This ability is more important than IQ or the socio economic status of the family you grew up in for determining career success, financial success and health,” Goleman said.

Teachers say students are unable to comprehend the same texts that generations of students that came before them could master without problems, said Goleman. These are signs that educators may need to start paying attention to the act of attention itself. Digital natives may need help cultivating what was once an innate part of growing up.

Goleman is not naive about the role digital devices play in society today, but he does believe that without managing how devices affect kids better they’ll never learn the attention skills they’ll need to succeed in the long term.

“There’s a need now to teach kids concentration abilities as part of the school curriculum,” Goleman said. “The more children and teens are natural focusers, the better able they’ll be to use the digital tool for what they have to get done and then to use it in ways that they enjoy.”

Some argue that the current generation of students grew up with digital devices and are much better at multitasking than their parents. But the idea of multitasking is a myth, Goleman said. When people say they’re  “multitasking,” what they are really doing is something called “continuous partial attention,” where the brain switches back and forth quickly between tasks.

“I don’t think the enemy is digital devices,” Goleman said. “What we need to do is be sure that the current generation of children has the attentional capacities that other generations had naturally before the distractions of digital devices. It’s about using the devices smartly but having the capacity to concentrate as you need to, when you want to.”

Mindfulness in the Classroom

Called “mastermind,” the class is a new elective for sixth-graders that blends some of the tenets of yoga and meditation with the science of the brain.

The idea is to teach students to manage stress, improve focus, build empathy, be optimistic — above all, to live in the moment. The umbrella term used to describe these concepts is “mindfulness.”

The curriculum centers on 15 lessons based in neuroscience that explain how chemicals released in the brain can trigger anxiety, fear and other emotions that, with proper training, can be regulated.

In many ways, it is about trying to get kids to think about the present in an environment where everybody else is telling them to think about the future.

The class typically begins with the ding of a digital chime that gradually faded into silence. For two full minutes, the students sit still and focused on their breathing.

Billed as a research-based program, MindUP is an initiative of the Goldie Hawn Foundation, which trains teachers in the methodology.

The class isn’t just about breathing. In a sense, it’s centered on the premise that people can learn to be better adjusted and happy.

We tend to think that whether we are optimistic or not — that that’s just the way we are. But you can choose to be optimistic, empathetic or compassionate.

Why do you make better decisions when you are calm? Because the prefrontal cortex makes decisions, but when you’re not calm your amygdala is actively taking over your entire brain.

According to MindUP methodology, research shows that the brain also releases dopamine when people perform acts of kindness.