Children's Attention Spans are Short, and Education Demands Too Much of Them

The 2016 paper, “Off-task behavior in elementary school children,” was published in the peer-reviewed journal Learning and Instruction, and was funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, an arm of the Department of Education.

The researchers also kept track of how the teachers were instructing students during these observations. Not surprisingly, students went off task more frequently during whole-group instruction than during small group or individual work.

Length of lesson matters, too. Students went off task more often as an instructional activity increased beyond 10 minutes. Indeed, the researchers found that 25 percent of instructional activities lasted longer than 17 minutes. That’s longer than the typical adult attention span of 15 minutes, according to Karrie Godwin, a professor at Kent State University, and one of the lead authors of the study.

“If adults are not good at maintaining attention, and we’re talking mature cognition, it’s certainly going to be difficult for children,” said Godwin. “This research points to divvying up instructional activities into smaller chunks.”

Godwin especially recommends smaller blocks of time for challenging material, such as fractions. A common source of distraction was classroom decor. A quarter or more of all off-task behavior involved kids looking at posters or playing with classroom objects. That confirmed Godwin’s laboratory research in 2014, which found that heavily decorated classrooms hinder learning for kindergarteners. In her laboratory, Godwin is now experimenting with projectors that change what is displayed on the walls depending on what subject is being taught.

We certainly don’t want to promote putting children in a sterile environment,” said Godwin. “Maybe it’s okay if kids are distracted by the learning environment if the distractions are closely aligned with the educational goals. We’re researching that now.”

It’s an open question whether all off-task behavior is bad. Previous research has generally shown that distractions reduce the amount of time that kids are learning and that in turn lowers achievement. However, some psychologists have theorized that children can productively give themselves a sort of “time out” to calm themselves, and then re-engage in the lesson with renewed concentration. Experts call it emotional self-regulation. Others theorize that seemingly irrelevant conversations between peers are helping to build social bonds that allow group projects to flourish. And some theories link off-task behavior to creativity.