The situation: You want to have an engaging classroom experience with your students, to see growth in their thinking or content knowledge over the semester, to receive high-quality work that demonstrates the fulfillment of course learning objectives. However, you find that students are often disengaged in the classroom, dividing their attention between technology and their physical learning environment. The assignments you receive show undeveloped thinking, gaps in content knowledge, and lack of coherence.
Many of our students grew up with powerful, ever-present technologies in their hands before parents and educators could understand their effects on mental health and learning. With minimal guidance, they were expected to balance these addictive, ubiquitous technologies with expectations for academic and social success.
Your own education and research has required reading, writing, and projects that involve sustained attention over time. You have had to read closely, rewrite and revise, and understand your subject at great depth. Your learning objectives and assignments ask students to do the same, but they seem incapable. Your choices seem to be to lower your standards or be perpetually frustrated.
The response: A growing number of university educators and researchers are realizing that there is a third response beyond resignation and frustration: helping your students develop the attention literacy needed to succeed in an environment of information overload and endless potential distractions.
The Attention Literacy Initiative can help faculty:
- Understand and acknowledge why and how students are struggling
- Develop an understanding of attentional limitations and potentials
- Guide students toward resources and practices that help students fulfill course goals and our expectations
- Integrate attention literacy into your teaching and assignments
- Develop a language and conceptual frameworks for talking about attention
