What is attention and how to improve it?
Affection affects the way that we learn, are there ways for us to improve how we put attention towards learning and not just things that we like. There are many ways in which we can have more attention to something. There are situations where attention helps in learning such as in how much time will the students start to not pay attention
According to John Medina in the Chapter of Attention, he states,” So I ask this question in every college course I teach:Given a class of medium interest, not too boring and not too exciting, when do you start glancing at the clock, wondering when the class will be over?’’(Medina, 106)’’
He explains in this excerpt that the human brain is not able to have full attention for a long time. As well, he says that most of the students lose interest in the class after the first 10 minutes.The conclusion that he says is that it is best for teachers to rearrange their classes for students to break the barrier of the 10 minutes to not lose interest in the class. During the lectures there are times where it starts to become repetitive and students believe that it isn’t worth the time listening and lose attention. Although the barrier of attention seems fake, many studies say that the best business speeches are the ones that are 10 minutes, not more than that. Why? In 10 minutes you can demonstrate your point and not bore your audience. Another point is do not give 10 points of information since the audience will not be able to remember, the best is 2 or 3 points for the memory to remember. On the other hand, there are more events that affect attention such as interest in certain artefacts. Whenever you have an interest towards something, your attention starts to focus on those things, and then you will start to notice that item more. An example of this would be if you buy a mini-cooper, your attention will start focusing on mini-coopers and you will notice them more often. You will think that it is just that there are more mini-coopers bought, however it is just your brain that is now focusing on them. This also happens in what you hear and watch, if you start practicing an instrument and you like it. Then your attention starts focusing on it and you start watching videos of the instrument and you start thinking more about it.
Human nature doesn’t realize that we focus our attention on things that we really care about and don’t focus on things that aren’t that interesting for each human. Whenever you start realizing some hobbies your attention will start focusing on it. However, there are ways for this attention to not decrease and for the results of students to increase. A statement from John Medina,‘’I decided that every lecture I’d ever give would be organized in segments and that each segment would last only 10 minutes. Each segment would cover a single core concept — always large, always general, and always explainable in one minute’’(Medina,#120). This statement demonstrates that teachers understand that students lose attention at around the 10 minute mark of the lecture. The way that the teachers try to not lose attention of their students is by giving just 10 minutes of one segment and anticipating the deconcentration they try to hook the audience for them to put in the next segment. Around the globe, teachers don’t understand this topic and decide to make some lecture of an hour long of just one topic giving certain information that is not needed and filling it for their lecture. I would prefer that teachers just give the important information in the lecture and not try to make it longer since this isn’t the best way of teaching. This is not the only way possible to make students learn and don’t learn information that will not help us understand the topic. There are ways like letting students ask questions while giving the lecture for them to show that they are paying attention and their knowledge is increasing.
