Chapter 8

During our group discussion, we looked at the question, “What is attention?” To pay attention in class means to stay focused and concentrate on the subject matter that is being taught. All teachers have a different way of teaching lessons. In general, elementary teachers use a lot of hands on activities, whereas high school teachers use more of a lecture-based approach. We discussed how it is easier to pay attention when different approaches are used throughout one lesson. We agreed that when we were young students, we were more likely to pay attention for a longer period of time because elementary teachers must use many different approaches when teaching a lesson because they are dealing with young children because their attention spans are much shorter. It is much harder to pay attention for long periods of time in higher-level classes because many teachers use the lecture-based approach. We agreed that in lecture-based classes we would pay attention for roughly the first ten minutes, then our minds would wander for most of the remaining time in class. High school teachers and even college professors could change this by using more hands-on activities in their classrooms. I think many teachers see hands-on activities as juvenile and the lecture-based approach as a more mature way of learning. Personally, I have had two teachers at Luther use the hands-on approach to teaching and I have retained more information from their classes than I have from the classes with professors who simply lecture.
Developmental changes also have an effect on attention. As we get older, the more we are able to pay attention for longer periods of time. Young children spend little time focused on any one object or event and like to move from one activity to the next. Santrock’s textbook talks about a study that was done on young children’s social skills and how their social skills are related to attention. This study suggested that, “young children who have difficulty regulating their attention are more likely than other children to experience peer rejection and engage in aggressive behavior” (267). We were not exactly sure as to why this was, but we though maybe it was because children are judgmental at that age. We all talked about experiences that we had in elementary and/or middle school that were related to kids being mean to other kids because they were “different” or “not normal.”
Our group also discussed the question, “What is memory?” We thought this went along with the topic of attention because in order to retain information, one must pay attention to the information being taught. If lessons are not taught in a way that will capture the attention of students, then they will most likely not remember much, if any, of what was taught. Capturing the attention of students is more easily done by using the hands-on approach to teaching.