Children's Attention Spans are Short, and Education Deman...

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...

 How to Improve Self-Control in Schools

Make school more demanding for all students In its coverage of U.S. secondary education, the popular press tends to focus on two relatively small groups: students headed for elite colleges (many of whom are under tremendous stress and pressure) and students at risk for dropping out (many of whom come from the most disadvantaged communities). These stories are important to tell, but they leave out the vast majority of students, who don't fall into either of these extremes. These high school st...