Last week I chose to explore the educational and psychological benefits of smaller class sizes for students, and while I am not choosing to go more in depth for this topic in particular, it did spark my interest in another potential psychological topic to look into. One of the most prominent benefits found from the presence of small class sizes was the increased amount of engagement students had within the class period as well as the more individualized attention that could be paid to the students by the teacher. The concept of attention was what interested me the most, but not in the sense of teachers attending to students. I want to look more specifically at what students are attending to, to what extent they are attending to it, and how certain educational environments and strategies can be utilized and applied to ensure enhancement of attention and thus that students are fully intaking the desired information to the maximum potential.
According to Luck & Vecera (2000), attention is defined as, “restricting cognitive processes to a subset of the available information in order to improve the speed or accuracy of the cognitive processes.” Essentially, attention is the process of concentrating on certain features of the environment or on specific thoughts or activities. But what are we attending to? Treisman and Gelade (1980) proposed a popular theory of attention called the Feature Integration Theory. This theory suggests that we have a preattentive stage which perceives primitive features such as color, orientation, movement, shape, etc. The theory then suggests a focused attention stage in which the features perceived in the preattentive stage are integrated and associated with information previously stored in our memories to produce perception and understanding. This model suggests that attention is crucial for the integration of information and features.
As this model points out, attention plays a key role in visual perception. Now, how can this information be applied in an academic setting? What is its importance? Well, with the recent increase in technology, many classrooms and teachers have adapted their styles to incorporate powerpoint presentations as primary tools of teaching. Understanding how features and information are attended to could be key to understanding how to structure the most stimulating and effective presentation of information to students based on knowing what features are most highly attended to and how they are most effectively integrated in the focused attention stage.
Other helpful research in this regard has come from Almer, Happer & Kaplan (2003) which tested the effect of display of information as well as the typeface on perception and retrieval. The study concluded that the way information was displayed (either in paragraph format or bullet point formatting) influenced perception and retrieval levels, but typeface (standard vs. bold or underline) did not. Studies such as this are important in determining how students will learn best based on what they are attending to in a traditional classroom format.
As attention is such a complex psychological topic, it is one I plan to explore further in the upcoming weeks in regards to the consequences of not attending to information presented in specific classroom formats, how much of our classroom behavior and learning is automatized and done without consciously attending to specific information, and further information about what techniques enhance attention in students and thus increase perception and understanding.
References
Almer, E. D., Hopper, J. R., & Kaplan, S. E. (2003). A research tool to increase attention to experimental materials: Manipulating presentation format. Journal of Business and Psychology, 17(3), 405-405. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/196905508?accountid=9525
Luck, S. J. & Vecera, S. P. (2000). Attention: From tasks to mechanisms. To appear in H. Pashler & S. Yantis (Eds.), Steven’s Handbook of Experimental Psychology. Retrieved from http:// www.psychology.uiowa.edu/Faculty/Vecera/lab/papers/object_attention.pdf
Treisman, A. M., & Gelade, G. (1980). A feature integration theory of attention. Cognitive Psychology, 12, 97-136. Retrieved from: http://www.cse.psu.edu/~rcollins/CSE597E/papers/treismanFeatIntegration.pdf
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