Improving attention and focus in classroom environments

Published: October 22, 2024

Maintaining students’ concentration has often been a challenge, but for many teachers, this is now especially true thanks to the rise of technology and the consequences of disrupted schooling leftover from the COVID-19 pandemic. At the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in the US, Dr Agatha Lenartowicz and Dr Jennie Grammer are combining the fields of neuroscience and education to monitor and improve student focus in classrooms.

Glossary

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) — a condition that includes developmentally inappropriate levels of inattentive, hyperactive and impulsive behaviours

Electroencephalogram (EEG) — a non-invasive recording of electrical brain activity using small sensors placed on top of the scalp

Oscillations — regular changes in waves or electric currents

Visual cortex — the part of the brain that processes sensory nerve impulses from the eyes

Attention control describes our ability to focus and to ignore distractions, and it has a huge influence on daily life. Understanding attention control is critically important for teachers and students, as it impacts students’ school performance, learning outcomes and personal success.

At the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Dr Agatha Lenartowicz and Dr Jennie Grammer are studying attention control in elementary-age (in the UK, key stage 2) students, to understand the brain mechanisms that dictate what students focus on and what they ignore, with the goal of improving educational outcomes for as many students as possible.

“While there is extensive research on attention in lab settings, we know surprisingly little about what attention looks like in the real-world environments where these skills matter most,” says Jennie.

ADHD and attention control

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), over 11% of children in the US have ADHD, a condition that can make them more likely to repeat school grades and drop out of high school or college.

“Student attention is not something that is commonly taught in teacher-education programmes, despite all teachers (that we interviewed) describing increased concerns about student attention and persistence,” says Jennie. “One recent study of over 1,000 educators revealed that only 17% felt very well prepared to teach students with learning differences.”

While treatment strategies and medications to help with ADHD have been effective at reducing symptoms, they do not generally improve overall academic performance. “As such, there exists a significant gap between findings in the lab and the everyday, practical impact for children, in terms of educational outcomes and in cases of neurodivergence,” says Agatha.

Gathering research data in a classroom

To combat the problem of the disconnect between laboratory findings and real-world situations, Agatha and Jennie are monitoring attention control directly in classrooms by using mobile-EEG devices. Their study involves using EEG sensors on elementary students aged between six and nine years old, some of whom have ADHD and some of whom do not.

During the study, students take part in class activities, with a subgroup of those students, who have been introduced to the EEG equipment, having their brain activity recorded at the same time.

The EEG sensors work by recording neural oscillations at different frequencies, which reflect the brain working through different processes. “The EEG sensors can reliably pick up oscillations in the 8-12Hz frequency range, referred to as ‘alpha’ oscillations, which can tell us about attentiveness,” explains Agatha. “When alpha oscillations are big, the brain tissue is less responsive to sensory inputs, whereas, when they are small, this typically corresponds to the brain tissue being more responsive to sensory inputs. So, if we know that a student in a classroom should be looking at a teacher, listening and processing instructions, but we see a lot of alpha signals in our EEG recording, this might tell us that the student is not visually attending and, perhaps, they’re daydreaming instead.”

By tracking the alpha signals during classroom activities, the research team can see which factors lead to the highest level of engagement in different students. These might include doing a group activity rather than an individual activity (or vice versa) or finding ways to reduce normal types of distractions in school (such as students walking past and looking through windows).

“Another use of such a signal is to measure how long a given student can effectively pay attention in a chosen activity,” Agatha explains. This can help teachers decide the optimal length of activities and establish if students would benefit from extra time.

Advantages of the EEG technique

Currently, for in-class assessment, students’ concentration is monitored by video recordings and observations by teachers. “This technique has notable limitations,” says Agatha. “It is resource-demanding, requiring multiple observers (to cross check for consistency) and for those observers to be extensively trained. Video recordings also compromise the privacy of participants and background bystanders.”

“The method is also blind to off-task performance when the child has not made outward changes in behaviour, such as daydreaming while staring at a worksheet,” Agatha adds. “In contrast, the mobile-EEG technique can provide low-resource, privacy-preserving and objective assessment of attention states in the classroom setting.”

Limitations with the EEG technique

The main problem with collecting EEG data in classrooms with young children is the classroom noise produced by physical movement. While this noise can be controlled in a laboratory setting by making participants sit still and look at one fixed point, this is not possible in classroom environments!

Reference
https://doi.org/10.33424/FUTURUM539

A student is working on an individual hands-on activity while neural signals are recorded using a portable EEG cap.
(Photo credit: Zoe Mao)

The neural signals are collected on a computer, while a child can freely move and engage in different learning activities during the neural recording.
(Photo credit: Zoe Mao)
Very clear instructions and an adult available to answer questions and provide support are vital for students’ attention.
© Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock.com

Instead, Agatha and Jennie try to measure the noise separately from the brain signals. “We use digital filtering algorithms to separate brain and noise signals which are mixed in the EEG recordings. We then measure the amount of noise present in the signal and if it exceeds a threshold, we ignore the data during the analyses,” says Agatha.

However, there are more than just technical challenges to this process. “We have questions from parents and caregivers about data security: are the neuroscientific measures we gather diagnostic in some way, or could they be used to negatively stereotype or track their child?” explains Jennie. “Educators have pragmatic concerns as well. Since school disruptions related to COVID-19, there are more demands of classroom time than ever before.”

Despite these challenges, Agatha and Jennie are passionate about the importance of their work. “There is a lot of enthusiasm for neuroscience in education and the potential it has for understanding student learning and development,” says Jennie.

Dr Agatha Lenartowicz
Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, University of California Los Angeles

Staglin OneMind Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior, USA

Dr Jennie Grammer
UC|CSU Collaborative for Neuroscience, Diversity and Learning

Department of Education & Information Sciences, University of California Los Angeles, USA

Fields of research: Neuroscience, education

Research project: Monitoring attention in elementary-age students

Funder: US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)

This work is/was supported by the NIMH, under award number MH119448. The contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of NIMH.

Case study: is fidgeting good or bad for attention?

The jury on the interpretation of fidgeting is still out,” says Agatha. On the one hand, the team has observed that during a hands-on task, fidgeting may decrease as the visual system engages. “But, it is also possible that fidgeting may increase (and serve a supportive role for attention) when the difficulty of the task exceeds comfort levels,” she says. “As such, it needs to be considered in context and requires further research for firm conclusions.” Moreover, in cases where the activities are not hands-on, we see that fidgeting can be unrelated to visual attention. This is important as it may suggest that fidgeting should not be used as a direct indicator of attention in some cases.

“We encourage teachers to pay attention to things going on in the classroom – like changes in activities – that precede the behaviour,” adds Jennie. “Does a student fidget more or less when particular activities begin, like the start of a test, for example? Does the student begin to fidget when it is almost time for recess, and they are excited about the opportunity to go outside? This behaviour could be linked to attention, or it could reflect anxiety or excitement. Observing to see if there are any reliable patterns of antecedents and subsequent behaviours is a very practical way of thinking about student behaviour.”

Laboratory findings versus classroom findings

Brain activity and attention control have been studied in laboratory settings before, but often, these findings do not correlate with real-life outcomes. “In laboratory tests, challenging tasks engage visuo-spatial attention systems, and decrease the alpha-range neural oscillations,” says Agatha. This decrease in alpha oscillations means students are less distracted and more likely to focus. “This means that the visual cortex is actively engaged in processing the sensory inputs and interacting with other parts of the brain. This response is often correlated with better performance on a task, which we can measure in the lab as faster, less variable, and more accurate responses,” says Agatha.

However, this link between challenging tasks and increased focus only weakly predicts real-life outcomes, such as academic performance in school. “In the lab, there are fewer intervening steps between brain process and response.” In contrast, in a school setting, a child might take in information from a teacher, and then do other things such as look out the window, fidget, write something down, talk to other students, stand up or sit down, all before acting on the instructions given. In a lab setting, a child would simply take the information and immediately act on it, hence making the link between challenging tasks and increased focus much stronger and clearer to see.

“Moving between lab and natural environments is precisely our solution to bridge the gap. How is that core brain-behaviour relationship changed when we are in a classroom? How do we determine what factors drive behaviour the most?” asks Agatha.

Research findings so far

Agatha and Jennie are still in the middle of their research. “However, our early findings offer some broad take-homes,” says Agatha. “One is that being still does not necessarily indicate attentiveness, especially when the learning context is passive (such as videos). Active learning conditions (like an independent activity) may provide more useful physical indicators for assessing engagement and may be more effective at engaging children who are inattentive in other conditions.” In other words, behavioural indicators of active engagement (such as answering questions, following teacher instructions, and orienting towards the activity) appear more closely related to neural indicators of visual attention than fidgeting or being still.

A second initial finding of Agatha and Jennie’s work is that, for young children, engagement decreases within seven to ten minutes of working on an activity with a teacher. “This might translate into less instructing and more doing, depending on the child,” says Agatha. Jennie and Agatha observed a teacher setting up an activity with explicit instructions followed by the children working independently on the task. The goal and activity were clear, but students were working independently after receiving instruction at the outset. “For me, this suggests that direct instruction for students is important, but does not have to look like a long lecture,” explains Jennie. “Instead, for many students, setting up lessons and activities with clear guidance can be enough for them to work independently and support attention.”

The team’s third finding is a surprising one. “We found that active engagement and neural engagement are significantly stronger when children are working alone on an educational craft activity,” says Agatha. “Very clear instructions and an adult available to answer questions and provide support are vital to facilitating this type of hands-on activity, but the independent element of their learning can really engage and maintain students’ attention.”

Jennie and Agatha are keen to highlight that individual children respond differently to different environments, but even small changes to classroom lay out and/ or activities can have a significant impact on students’ attention. “For example, if you have students walking by your window and you notice that a few students in your classroom are distracted by this, you could try something as simple as moving their placement in the classroom (so they don’t face the window) or papering over the lower part of a window to reduce the distraction for all students,” says Jennie. “These are low cost, easy to implement solutions that teachers can take and which our research shows can be very effective.”

Focusing forward

The team’s next steps are to add measures such as monitoring heart rate, eye gaze, blink rate, movement and posture to see how else (in addition to the EEG devices) they can study attention. Agatha and Jennie also hope to focus more on questions surrounding self-regulation and persistence. “In future studies, we can compare interactions of brain signals, neural arousal, and motivation during hard versus easy activities, such as different levels of math problems” says Agatha.

“The long-term goal of our research is to provide concrete guidelines on which environmental variables could be helpful to different types of students, and make specific, developmentally appropriate recommendations for how to structure lessons and activities,” explains Jennie.

There are several factors involved in children’s persistence and self-regulation. Studying brain activity in real-world classroom settings allows Agatha and Jennie to start getting a grasp on how these contextual, environmental and social factors are impacting students. “For example, in another study, we found that girls persist, even when the task is very challenging and potentially unsolvable, and in contrast boys, on average, would not,” says Jennie.

One of the team’s primary objectives is to disseminate and share their research amongst current and new teachers to make sure that it can be useful in real-world scenarios. “It is also very important for us to work with teachers directly to target our studies more precisely on problems that need solving for practical impact,” says Agatha.

Finally, the team hopes that their work will be applicable in improving educational practice and policy. “When we consider the types of policy changes that might impact educator practice, the main opportunities come in terms of the standards that US states set for teacher training and continued professional development,” says Jennie.

Student attention is not something that is commonly taught in teacher-education programmes in the US, and changing this could massively increase the confidence that teachers have when dealing with attention control. “Involving neuroscience education in teacher education may offer teachers a powerful tool to better understand and optimise their students’ learning,” adds Agatha.

Do you have a question for Agatha or Jennie?
Write it in the comments box below and Agatha or Jennie will get back to you. (Remember, researchers are very busy people, so you may have to wait a few days.)

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