Editore"s Note
Tilting at Windmills

Email Newsletter icon, E-mail Newsletter icon, Email List icon, E-mail List icon Sign up for Free News & Updates

April 1, 2005
By: Kevin Drum

SHORT ATTENTION SPANS....Via Joanne Jacobs, a Kaiser Family Foundation study says that kids today can't concentrate as well as they used to:

Children are more attuned to distractions around them. "They attend to everything the air vents creaking, someone talking. They bounce from task to task. Teachers here say kids have more trouble getting organized, and their attention spans are not as good as they used to be," says school psychologist Tamara Waters-Wheeler of the Bismarck-Mandan, N.D., public schools.

Studies with college students and adults show that the brain doesn't work as well when it focuses on more than one task, [David] Walsh says. If the challenge demands a lot of attention, mental performance is particularly poor.

My mother was a fourth grade teacher. She told me once that when she started teaching (circa 1970) she could plan lessons that were about 30 minutes long. After that the kids started getting antsy. By the time she retired (circa 2000), that was down to 15 minutes.

But here's what I'm curious about. The idea that kids have shorter attention spans these days doesn't surprise me, and the hypothesis that it's due to the rise of TV and video games vs. reading and baseball playing doesn't surprise me either. But what about the flip side? Inability to concentrate is surely a problem, but isn't the ability to easily flip between multiple tasks a corresponding benefit? In fact, given the faster pace and increased complexity of the world today, I sometimes wonder if the tradeoff isn't a pretty good one.

Has anyone ever studied the benefits of facile multitasking? There must be some, even if us stone age types don't immediately see it.

Kevin Drum 12:56 PM Permalink | Trackbacks

Bookmark and Share
 
Comments




 

 

Read Jonathan Rowe remembrance and articles
Email Newsletter icon, E-mail Newsletter icon, Email List icon, E-mail List icon Sign up for Free News & Updates

Advertise in WM



buy from Amazon and
support the Monthly


Place Your Link Here

--- Links ---

Boarding Schools

Addiction Treatment Centers

Alcohol Treatment Center

Bad Credit Loan

Long Distance Moving Companies

FREE Phone Card

Flowers

Personal Loan

Addiction Treatment

Phone Cards

Less Debt = Financial Freedom

Addiction Treatment Programs