More attention during class means more learning. Sounds logical, doesn’t it? One would hope that students who are less distracted and pay better attention will take more out of the lesson. A recent study shows it can be more complicated…
Roberts and colleagues investigated in a randomised experiment what happens when extra support for attention and self-regulation is added to reading instruction. Their study was published in “Exceptional Children”, and their sample included 159 students in Grades 3 to 5 from six American schools. They particularly focused on students who had problems reading and focusing in class.
The RCT randomly allocated participants to one of three groups. The first group received intensive reading intervention in small groups consisting of 2 to 4 pupils. The second group received the same reading intervention but also a special program for attention and self-regulation. The third group was a control group and received standard school support.
The supplementary program, Engaged Learners, consisted of:
- clear behavioural expectations,
- a visual overview of the lesson activities,
- specific praise,
- a points system through which they could earn rewards
The pupils also learned:
- to set goals for their behaviour,
- evaluate themselves,
- and reflect on what they could do better in the next lesson.
The intervention ran from October to February, with 30- to 40-minute lessons held three to five times a week.
The extra support worked quite well to make students more attentive. During reading lessons, students who received the supplementary program were attentive for an average of 65% of the time. For students who received reading instruction exclusively, this was 41%. That’s a difference of roughly 24 percentage points, with a large effect size (g = 1.14). The supervisors also reported fewer attention problems among students who received the supplementary program.
But what happened to reading performance? The title already gives part of it away. The students who received extra attention support did not learn to read demonstrably better than students who received only reading instruction. On all investigated reading measures, the results favoured the group that received only reading instruction. Usually, the differences were not statistically significant, but this was the case for a test on phonemic decoding (g = 0.33 in favour of reading instruction only).
Not entirely surprisingly, students who received reading instruction exclusively performed significantly better on various reading measures than students who received the usual support. Moreover, the researchers found no statistically significant differences between the group that combined reading instruction with attention support and the control group.
How is that possible? The researchers themselves offer several possible explanations. The first is something very simple: time. The supplementary programme took roughly four to six minutes in total, spread across the beginning and end of each lesson. This may not sound like much, until one realises that the lesson lasted 30 to 40 minutes. That’s a considerable proportion of the available instructional time. The students were thus paying more attention to the reading lessons, but there was less time for the actual reading. Personally, I find this explanation rather convincing.
Another possible reason is that the program itself added to the cognitive load. Students had to concentrate not only on the reading, but also on their behaviour, goal evaluation, and the compliments and rewards. Maybe all of this required attention and working memory that could otherwise be used for reading. Maybe both factors were involved. However, these are just possible reasons. The researchers did not know why the extra help did not result in better reading skills. It would have been interesting to include a fourth group that received the same amount of reading instruction as the reading-only group, but with additional time for attention support.
Moreover, there was another result. The improved attention was limited to the reading lessons in which the program was used. The regular classroom teachers reported no significant improvement in these students’ attention during their regular lessons. But, of course, we have long known how difficult transfer is.
One should keep in mind that this is a relatively small sample of students, and only 130 of them were included in the analysis. Besides, it is a very particular group of students having difficulties with reading and attention. So, one should not generalise the findings of this study to all students or all forms of attention support.
I found it worth writing about this research because it emphasises something we tend to forget. One can achieve success in modifying behaviour without necessarily teaching more. It reminds me of Robert Coe’s list of things we sometimes mistakenly confuse with learning.
Of course, this does not mean that attention is unimportant for learning, or that we should not support students with attention problems. But it does suggest that we should be careful when assuming that improved attention will automatically lead to better learning outcomes.