It is a remark I have heard more than once over the past few years from teachers, or seen appearing in Teacher Tapp results. Not as a grand theory or dramatic analysis, but simply as an observation from the classroom:
“Since Covid, it seems as if some pupils have more difficulty paying attention.”
“It takes longer before everyone is on track.”
“They get distracted more quickly.”
With impressions like these, you always have to be cautious. Education has a long history of stories about how things were supposedly better in the past. At the same time, it may well be that something has indeed changed. And every now and then, research appears that at least tries to understand where that feeling might come from.
A recent study in Child Development by Eleanor Johns and colleagues followed 139 children aged roughly between 2.5 and 6.5 years. The researchers looked at their executive functions: skills such as directing attention, remembering rules, suppressing impulses and dealing flexibly with changing tasks. These are exactly the cognitive abilities that help children function in a classroom.
The researchers had the advantage of having measurements both before and after the pandemic. That allowed them to compare children who developed during the pandemic period with earlier cohorts.
And they did indeed find a difference.
Children who went through their early development during the pandemic scored somewhat lower on tasks measuring executive functions. In particular, the differences appeared in inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility. That does not mean that children suddenly lost these abilities, nor that a “lost generation” has appeared. The differences were modest, and there was still a lot of variation between children.
But the findings do suggest that the pandemic period may have had subtle effects on early cognitive development.
The authors themselves are careful in their interpretation. The study cannot demonstrate exactly why these differences emerged.
Several explanations are possible.
During the pandemic, young children experienced:
- less interaction with peers
- fewer structured activities
- more time at home
- more screen exposure in some cases
All of these factors could potentially influence the development of executive functions.
But it is important not to jump to overly simple conclusions. Development is complex, and children are remarkably resilient. Many of these differences may well diminish over time. Still, the study is interesting because it provides empirical support for a feeling that many teachers have expressed. Not as proof that “children can no longer concentrate”, but as a possible explanation for why classrooms sometimes feel slightly different today than they did a few years ago.
Sometimes teachers notice small shifts before research manages to measure them.
And sometimes research confirms that those observations were not entirely imagined.