Brain Rules by John Medina suggests that attention span of a person/student [presumably in an academic setting] is about 10 minutes. However, after I dug around I could not find any current research to support this. Certainly we are told and assume that attention span is relatively short for today's digital native, however, I cannot find much research supporting this claim. The issue seems a tad important considering, many teachers use lectures to teach.
Potentially of interest:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/multitaskers-do-worse-tasks-require-focus
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.04.036
Dear Robin,
I cannot give you an exact answer to your question, but a student whose MA work I supervised was working in this field. He was assessing the effect of hand-held video games, using a text-based pokemon game, on students' short-term gains in English ability. Concerning engagement on task, he found that Japanese university students [digital natives] were able to focus very well on the reading task, and maintain their quite intense concentration. He described this in terms of Dörnyei et al's (2014) "Directional Motivational Current"model. This was a great result, because, as in many places, it can be a very hard task to make learners read extensively in their foreign language. He further found significant changes in learners' lexical skills due, probably, to the intensive reading experience with the gamification mode. His subjects didn't do this gamification reading as a required academic task. However, the study is indicative of what should be possible if digitial natives are afforded chances to engage in tasks that appeal to their learning styles.
A paper he wrote on it is available here:
https://www.academia.edu/18843866/The_Effect_of_Video_Games_on_Japanese_University_Student_Reading_and_Vocabulary_Comprehension
Robin:
It depends on their interests. As mentioned above, it appears they are engrossed in learning activities such as gaming. If they are given a video, they would not look at anything longer than 3 minutes if it's purely academic. However, if it's something like a movie trailer that they need to critically analyse, then they may be more apt to keep focus on as it is entertaining. Hope this answers your question.
Debra
@Tom - Thanks for the reference - I will dig deeper
@David - I hadn't even considered attention span while reading - And that has been looked at a bit bu Nicholas Carr for example - Interesting to ponder when we lose focus while actually reading
@Debra - Yes - active engagement would probably increase attention span. In my mind, I was assuming my questions was focusing on attention is more passive activities like listening to a lecture or watching a video - Where did you get the 3 min figure for the academic video?
One should take into account the way the nervous system work.
Information channel, associated with the verbal communication, probably does not fill the whole attention space of the listener, which induces a bottleneck effect. This causes a gradual distraction and attention "flows" in to the inner speech of the student. The effect will be exacerbated particularly in the case of slow speech of teacher. Keeping attention will increase fatigue and gradually loss of interest on the message.
Therefore, the audience engagement, changes of the tempo of speech, jokes and the like interludes - can help to reset information channel and to renew focus.
@Mariusz - Very interesting and that makes sense. Do you think there is any reason to believe that, thorough experience, the sensitivity of the nervous systems and attention drift can be altered by being exposed to a constant array of short, stimulating messages. In other words, does the nervous system adapt and develop a new norm for attention drift of shift?
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