Scrolling through my Substack feed, I came across yet another article about how all students these days are zombies. It talks about them being unable to learn because they constantly crave “dopamine hits” from their phones (check out Tommy Blanchard’s article defending dopamine here). This all becomes a defense for why all screens are evil and technology is ruining our kids.
Is this a real problem?
These articles usually present stories from teachers about how their students are “zombies” who just stare blankly at their teachers and this is used to justify their anti-screens stance. I believe the teachers when they talk about their experience in the classroom, but lets try to unpack the problem here. I think there are a real set of problems that have arisen where (1) the educational system and policies have failed to keep up with the research and (2) teachers are bombarded by new, constantly changing technologies.
The problem isn’t with the kids. The problem isn’t with the teachers. The problem is system driven and requires a nuanced understanding and a nuanced solution – weren’t we just complaining that students were failing at nuanced thinking? Seems like most of the people in this conversation are, too.
Attention spans are shrinking! (Are they?)
“Attention span” isn’t really a concept that attention researchers use. The closest related concept seems to be sustained attention. Sustained attention is a critical requirement for learning. Even babies sustain attention on things, first attending to seemingly random things in their environment, then focusing on things they enjoy or want to learn more about. It’s true that there is a lot less focus these days on building the skill of sustained attention, with screens offering opportunities to switch your attention to the most interesting thing at that moment. However, sustained attention is a skill that can be strengthened through practice. It is also situationally- and person-dependent. For example, we can sustain our attention longer for things we find interesting or things we think are important.
Technology presents us with so much information, it makes sense to explore that information through snippets that are 30 seconds or less if you want to learn about many different things. Information is so readily available that the challenge is finding topics you find interesting in the constant stream of information rather than finding information about the topics of interest. Sorting through such information is best accomplished through spending a few seconds on each piece until we find what we want. Once we’ve found it, we can switch gears to do a deep dive into this interest. This is sometimes referred to as “lateral reading” in Educational Psychology. How much are we teaching students to be able to switch gears between these two modes versus continuing to teach as if the struggle is to find the information?
So Why Don’t They Pay Attention?
Let’s face it, traditional schooling is also boring. Kids raised on technology are used to swiping past anything that doesn’t interest them, so why would they pay attention to a lecture when they could just watch an animated video on YouTube about it (or about something else they find more interesting). We’ve known for a long time that lecture-based teaching is not very effective (Freemman et al., 2014) while enhanced-discovery tasks are one of the best ways to support learning (Alfieri et al., 2011). These tasks involve teachers supporting students based on individual student capability, requiring learners to actually remember and use the knowledge they are taught, and providing clear feedback throughout the learning process. There have been many alternatives to lecture-based teaching developed, including project-based and game-based learning and flipped classrooms. However, these newer approaches have not been broadly accepted. Back in the day we paid more attention to lectures (at least some of us did) because, what else were we going to do? Nowadays, you need to find ways to actively engage students and give them reasons to care. If you can find ways to enable your students to connect what they’re supposed to be learning with things they find interesting, they will be more willing to engage. Similarly, if students understand the value in what they are learning, they will engage more. Now, if you’re a teacher thinking “how on earth can I find something all of my students will find interesting?” - you can’t. But with so much information out there, you can challenge your students to find connections with what you’re trying to teach them while also giving them guidance and support (i.e., enhanced-discovery learning). This can look different for different classes – finding uses for math that are relevant to the students, letting them pick the topic to practice writing or other expression, or figuring out different ways to express skills.
Unfortunately, the obsession with quantifying student and teacher performance through standardized tests gets in the way of these efforts. This requires everyone to pass the same test to prove their competency and pushes teachers away from more individualized assessments and methods of teaching. That, as well as the lack of support and resources allocated to teachers in general.
Society is also putting on a lot of pressure to do things quickly. Now that we can more easily get in touch with someone anytime, anywhere, we generally expect that they will respond to us immediately at any time from anywhere. This means you can always expect to be interrupted in the middle of what you’re doing. Given this, wouldn’t we be better off only doing things in small chunks so interruptions are less of a problem? Not really, we need to develop skills around holding boundaries (like I am not doing anything work-related outside of working hours I set--this does not need to be 9-5), protecting our time (turn off those notifications when you need to focus!), and pushing back generally against unrealistic time pressures. I’m lucky enough to have learned and practiced these skills for a long time, but most adults I know struggle with this, which brings us to the biggest problem…
You can’t teach what you don’t know
Humans learn a lot through modeling, but most of us have never been taught how to navigate all of this technology responsibly. If students aren’t being shown how to appropriately use tech at home and at school, how are they supposed to be able to do it themselves? And how do we teach them when we don’t possess the needed skills ourselves?
All of this new technology requires new skills and new ways of teaching old skills. There are programs for teaching digital literacy and while training is more work than banning, it is the more effective way to help students (and everyone else) to have a healthy relationship with technology beyond the classroom.
Even digital literacy training, however, is not a complete answer. These challenges with students are also a symptom of the current educational system and societal expectations, so to truly address the problem, there also need to be policy and system changes. Screen bans are merely a distraction away from these very real changes we need to address the complex, wide-spread problems with students checking out and not learning at school.
References
Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 111(23), 8410-8415. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1319030111
Alfieri, L., Brooks, P. J., Aldrich, N. J., & Tenenbaum, H. R. (2011). Does discovery-based instruction enhance learning?. Journal of educational psychology, 103(1), 1. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021017