The human brain is built to be miserly. We continually hoard mental energy so that we are always ready to fulfil our evolutionary fight-or-flight needs.
To save this mental energy, we all engage with the act of mind-wandering which, as every teacher knows, can prove costly for pupils’ learning and remembering.
Recent research on mind-wandering, involving more than 90 pupils aged between six and 11, revealed that mind-wandering occurs about 20 to 30 per cent of the time when listening to a story. Unsurprisingly, this common act of mind-wandering has a negative impact on how much of the narrative pupils can remember.
This research, by Jessica Cherry and colleagues at Queen’s University Belfast, supports previous research undertaken with adults, and suggests that mind-wandering appears to be an instinctive energy-saving strategy for our brains, young or old.
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Most teachers won’t be wholly surprised by these findings. We have all experienced that pupil staring aimlessly beyond our shoulder or peering out of the classroom window.
However, given that this seemingly instinctive strategy is so common, I’d argue it’s not worth much of our attention when planning to teach. Instead, simply knowing and understanding the persistent nature of mind-wandering can help us to consider how to address it so that it doesn’t compromise our pupils’ learning and remembering too significantly.
It is also worth considering the benefits that mind-wandering may bring. Some research on working memory suggests that mind-wandering isn’t a complete waste of time. A study published by Christine Godwin, and other US researchers in 2017 revealed, for example, that those who reported more frequent daydreaming scored higher on tests to measure intellectual creativity.
However, it’s clear that we can’t encourage children to mind-wander all the time; there are critical times in the classroom where there needs to be sustained attention on what is being taught. So how can we discourage unhelpful mind-wandering?
Research published by Evan Risko and colleagues, from the University of Memphis in 2013 and involving older students in university lecture halls, revealed that some learning tools may encourage more unhelpful mind-wandering than others.
Even among these adult students, the distraction of mobile phones and laptops overloaded their brains. Those students who paid attention to emails in lectures performed worse in subsequent memory tests.
This calls into question the use of laptops for note-making. Perhaps the learning benefit of using phones or laptops in the classroom may need to be revised if such activity supercharges mind-wandering?
It may be, though, that a few small tweaks to teaching can improve attention and increase pupils’ learning and remembering. One consistent finding from research is that mind-wandering can be reduced when people are interested in the topic at hand. Of course, we cannot make every topic in the classroom compelling but we can utilise creative hooks that instigate interest. For instance, you can begin a topic with a collage of interesting images and ask for connections to the new topic at hand.
Another everyday strategy to mitigate mind-wandering is targeted questioning. “Cold Calling” (a Doug Lemov Teach Like a Champion strategy) - that is to say, asking pupils questions by name and with conscious forethought of which children to engage - ensures that they have to allocate more attention to the potential of a question than a general “Can anyone tell me…?”
With more awareness of mind-wandering, we can rescue the attention of pupils and make a meaningful difference to their learning.
References
The link between mind wandering and learning in children - ScienceDirect
Everyday attention: Mind-wandering and computer use during lectures’.
Functional connectivity within and between intrinsic brain networks correlates with trait mind wandering
