Around the world, teachers are noticing that their pupils are losing the ability to pay attention.

A recent Cambridge International survey found that 88 per cent of teachers believe their students’ attention spans are getting shorter - and that this is having an impact on learning.

Of the teachers surveyed, 72 per cent said students are experiencing more difficulty in sustaining focus on complex topics, 64 per cent said students are finding it more challenging to complete longer assignments and 59 per cent linked a fall in attention to more classroom disruptions.

All of this follows increasing concern in recent years about pupils no longer being able to complete once-achievable tasks, such as reading whole books.

Yet Nilli Lavie, professor of psychology and brain sciences at University College London, says “there is no research that has directly shown” that pupils’ ability to pay attention has actually decreased. Instead, she says, the findings may simply reflect a change in attention habits.

Pupils’ changing attention habits

Lavie - who leads the attention and cognitive control research group, which investigates areas including attention, distraction, visual awareness and executive control - adds that this doesn’t mean that teachers who have noticed a change are wrong.

“I believe that teacher reports should be taken seriously,” she says, because they feed into a wider narrative around the fact that many of us are experiencing “a genuine challenge” in sustaining our attention.

It’s an issue that has been linked to our increasing reliance on technology, particularly the short-form content favoured by social media.

But all is not lost: Lavie says teachers shouldn’t “give up” on encouraging pupils to sustain their attention for longer periods, because research evidence does point to ways of engaging them more effectively.

So, what would that look like?

Tes sat down with Lavie to hear more about why teachers are reporting shorter attention spans - and how they can work around that in their lessons.

Tes: Let’s start with the basics. When we talk about “paying attention”, what do we really mean?

Professor Nilli Lavie: The overall concept of “attention” encompasses several different types.

Our research has shown that the type of attention required for what we call “perceptual capacity” - perceiving incoming information - is different from the type of attention that is needed for what we call “executive cognitive control”, which is controlling your processing and behaviour in line with what’s relevant, or allocating attention to processing relevant information instead of potentially more appealing distractors.

We have shown that different parts of the brain are associated with different attentional capacities and that there are clear differences between people.

Some people have a greater grey matter volume (the kind of brain tissue associated with any mental function) in the area of the brain known to mediate perceptual capacity.

Others have greater volume in the area known to mediate executive attention. There is no relationship between the two within each person, but each of these is shown to affect task performance.

Our research has shown that people who perform better at a task associated with, for example, perceptual capacity have greater grey matter volume in the area of the brain related to that function and, similarly, those with greater executive control ability can switch between tasks more effectively. They manage two tasks better than those with a small volume in that brain area.

What determines how much grey matter a person has related to each function?

You might ask if this is because of genetic differences - maybe some people have better attentional capacity and some people have less. But there is research on the specific effects of training, including a well-known study on London taxi drivers showing that they had more developed grey matter volume in the part of the brain related to spatial navigation.

That suggests attention can improve with practice, and the converse principle - that if you use it less, you then lose it; you have less grey matter volume - applies here.

Are teachers right when they report that pupils’ attention spans are decreasing?

This is a bit speculative at the moment; it hasn’t been scientifically proven that there has been a true decline in attention abilities among young people.

But there are surveys showing changes in attention habits, and there is research that shows that people who engage more in media multitasking (switching attention between different types of media) report a shorter attention span.

That’s because of their experience: they simply engage much more in short-attention-span practices when they spend a lot of time looking at social media, which tends to be either short TikTok videos or short posts on X. That can create a habit and an expectation for what should be the duration of their attention span in the classroom.

If you get into a certain habit, you have expectations in relation to that habit, but that doesn’t mean your real ability has changed.

Some studies have found that people who habitually engage in media multitasking have smaller grey matter volume in a brain area that is known to be involved in attentional control. This might reflect the “use it or lose it” principle, but it is important to note that this was only one brain area, while the wider brain network related to attention showed no changes in relation to media multitasking habits.

What is it about social media that affects our attention spans?

It’s the availability of information designed to be interesting and capture your attention away from any current focus. All the algorithms are exposing you to what you have shown you’re interested in. It’s designed to distract you.

So if you open social media while you’re doing homework - which I imagine some school pupils may do - it’s designed to take your attention away. And it does that in short bites.

But that doesn’t mean that all the time that young people spend engaging with digital media is damaging their attention. Interestingly, there is some research that shows that video game players have better perceptual capacity because they regularly exercise the ability to rapidly detect objects and process information.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend any of the “brain-training” apps that exist, though, because they focus on very specific tasks. They don’t reflect the fact that the kind of attention spans we need to perform well day-to-day are more generalised - for example, to listen throughout a lesson or focus on your reading for longer stretches of time.

Are young people particularly vulnerable to shifts in their attention spans?

I did some research with a PhD student that looked at sustained attention and distractibility in the classroom. We carried out the research on adolescents and found there was a developmental trajectory in their ability to sustain attention: the older adolescents were better able to sustain attention compared with the younger ones.

We also found that across all ages, those who had less ability to sustain attention reported being more distracted in the classroom. They were more vulnerable to processing irrelevant information and suffered from an inability to focus their attention.

So, clearly, young people are more vulnerable to shorter attention spans, and teachers are battling against developmentally immature ability, which lasts until later in adolescence.

What are the long-term implications of a shortened attention span on pupils’ education?

Education really requires attention, because it affects everything. It will start with pupils not perceiving something that they will never learn because they haven’t perceived it in the first place.

If they do hear something, they might still be able to repeat it after a very short time, but they won’t remember it in the longer term because they won’t have encoded it into their memory if they didn’t pay attention.

No doubt that will impair their educational ability, unless they have ways of compensating - if not in the classroom, then during homework.

If a person is motivated and yet experiences a reduced ability to sustain attention for a long time, they can still learn new information, but they have to take more breaks. There is research that shows that your attention improves if you have breaks.

But learning in the classroom is more efficient for the pupil. If they’re not paying attention in class, a teacher can tell them they can make up for it during homework, but it will take them longer to learn something at home because of all the breaks they’ll need.

So what can teachers do to better engage pupils with decreasing attention spans in class?

What teachers can do is think about how interactive their lessons are. Pupils’ attention is grabbed by tasks that have more perceptual stimulation. A greater level of interaction demands forces that go into paying attention.

It also helps if those pupils who are unable to sustain their attention throughout a lesson are not met with negative reinforcement.

So if a teacher gives out mini whiteboards, they should ask every pupil to answer the question and hold up their boards, rather than singling out those they assume aren’t paying attention. Learning is better with positive reinforcement.

Teachers should also bear in mind that some pupils may compensate for their lack of concentration in class by catching up via homework, so they should not assume inattentive pupils are necessarily underperforming.

Would having shorter lessons help?

School lessons are about an hour long and so, in themselves, provide a regular brain exercise to pay attention for longer durations. This is another way to train the brain because pupils experience regular periods of needing to pay attention for a longer stretch of time.

I wouldn’t recommend reducing the lesson duration or adapting it to include short, bite-sized micro lessons. Although challenging at times, longer lessons are highly valuable.

Another thing to consider is that most people do have the ability to sustain their attention on something interesting. And if the task provides a greater perceptual load for your brain, that is of benefit.

Instead of shortening lesson parts, greater engagement can be achieved by increasing visual aids, for example, as these attract attention at the early perceptual processing stage.

Besides reducing lesson time, are there any other practices that teachers should be wary of?

There are some lines of research that have shown that if people use ChatGPT, they exhibit lower brain activity related to memory. They will, for example, remember their own essays that were written with the help of ChatGPT less well than essays written without heavy reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) assistance.

That might seem obvious, but we know that increasing numbers of pupils are using ChatGPT for homework. If young people aren’t concentrating in class and more focus is being given to homework, then that is even more concerning.

I believe it is possible to find a way to benefit from AI assistance even during learning, but until this is found, this poses a true challenge.

Most of all, though, I think awareness is very important, not just of the challenges, but of the positive effects of classroom learning on attention - even if it can be difficult at times.

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