More tips from Craig Barton
Video transcript
hello i’m craig barton and welcome to another tips for teachers video now we’ve spoken about the split attention effect in previous videos it’s the notion that if students have to split their attention between two different modes of information it can be quite cognitively demanding and difficult to process well what i’m about to share with you next is rather painful for me because it’s almost as if i was aware of the split attention effect for the first 12 years of my career but did the exact opposite of what it was saying so i want you to imagine that you’re my students and i’m going to set you a problem so have a read of this problem and whilst you’re reading it try and listen to what i’m saying so i want you to read this problem really carefully if you get stuck feel free to use your notes i want you to set out your work super carefully as well underline your answers make sure you’re neat if you’re stuck you can speak to somebody now if you were my students you’d be thinking to yourself just shut up please just shut up because it’s so hard to read and listen simultaneously now why is that the case well it’s all to do with how working memory processes information we’ve got two channels in working memory one that processes audio and one that processes images now the problem with when you’re trying to read text is you first see it as an image but then you kind of read it out loud in your head like an internal monologue so you’ve got the audio that you’re trying to process from your reading and on the top i’m chatting away giving you another stream of audio to process and that therefore that auditory channel the phonological loop of working memory gets overwhelmed so it’s incredibly hard to process audio to listen whilst also reading at the same time so i’ve really tried to cut this out of my teaching because i used to do it all the time i would never shut up so now i try to do two things the first is if i ever ask my students to read something and as a math teacher this could be an equation as well it’s all the same stuff i shut up and crucially i ask my students to shut up in a nice way of course i want silence so that students can process that written text as easily as possible or if i suddenly realize i’ve got some instructions something that i want my students to listen to then it’s no good me saying okay stop reading that now listen to me because students are still trying to process that text so what i do in that case is i ensure all eyes are on me and not on the text if i’ve got a powerpoint with text on i’ll blank the screen pressing b on powerpoint or slide my projector because i don’t want students reading if i want them listening at the same time so what do you make of that have you fallen into that trap asking students to read and listen simultaneously what could you do to avoid it
2 replies on “Don’t ask students to listen and read simultaneously”
Hi Craig. As a teaching and learning coach I’m absolutely loving the short videos you are putting out there at the moment. Really useful, great quality stuff that I’m now sharing with the staff I work with. This issue of split attention is one that I’ve been focusing on recently and to help get teachers to understand the inherent difficulty with this I show them a youtube clip from a news channel that has an anchor/reporter talking and a headline banner scrolling at the bottom of the screen. I ask my teachers to notice what’s happening in their mind when they try to pay attention to both at the same time, and that’s when we get into multi-tasking as inefficient switching of attention from one input to the other. Great to see you are focusing some attention on this issue too (pardon the pun).
Hey Bev. Thanks so much for the message. The news is a great example! I’ll use that one! Thanks again!