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When learners attention drifts away from tasks (something called mind wandering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind-wandering#:~:text=The%20history%20of%20%EE%80%80mind-wandering%EE%80%81%20research) its important to understand what attentional resources are at play. In general attention resources (and other attention evidence based theories) suggest that if there is no actual demand for attention, such as a needed task, then it will drift. This raises alot of questions about what demands have been given to the learner, if they are fully aware of the demands needed, whether or not additional demands can be provided, etc. If someone was more interested in this they could review research such as the literature on attention theory, and any human factors research related to it. For example here is a link to an abstract that pertains to recent attention-based research (and researchgate/sciencedirect may also be helpful places) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1071181319631506?journalCode=proe
My recommendation for mind wandering would be the following:
1. To avoid mind wandering – ensure at the planning step that more variation of a learning activity/task can be generated easily (such as ChatGPT assisting with infinitely creating problems
2. Measure mind wandering and attentiveness – self reports, webcam/software to perform visual tracking, etc.
3. Adjust demands – not only creating more is an option (as stated above), but desirable difficulty, multiple representations, can be important. One method of providing difficulty could be providing near but incorrect examples (erroneous examples), having a GenAI tool assist in creating them could also assist.
4. Assess if the learner is overwhelmed – generally if cognitive load is exceeded people may space out or disengage, often as a way to reduce cognitive load. You can assess if they are overwhelmed by reducing tasks and seeing if they are then more attentive and capable (for example just doing 1 task at a time).From my previous studies in Human Factors, my professor recommended a model called SITE for examining phenomenon (in addition to doing research). SITE essentially means we should look at the outcomes we see, as the consequence of the system. We should look at things in the following way Situational factors (S), impact the individual (I) on some kind of level(cognitive, etc.), which then influence the task (T) (learning/performance/behaviour), which then influence the effect (outcome of the system, which could be all children bored). The key in SITE is to understand the relationship between variables enough to be able to change S (situation) based factors to ensure that the flow on effects work in the intended direction.
Hope this helps
Thanks
TedHumorous starters.
How would I lure students in?
Perhaps this isnt a helpful answer – but I wouldn’t bother with trying to solve this “problem”. From some research I did for our course I came across research that made it pretty clear that communities of practice/learning are generally full of lurkers, and infact this may be more a feature than a bug. Generally larger communities also tend to have more lurkers. If research suggests that the most successful communities are incredibly large and accessible, and that the vast majority of users are actually lurkers, are we categorizing the lack of participation as bad without evidence? From my research it appears that lurking is more a stage of where a community is, rather than its because there is an intellectual theif amongst us. Rather than building a community/learning for active participation, perhaps we should instead think – well if this is how it works (that lurkers are here to stay in this age of the internet and ever growing communities), how do we make it better for the lurkers? If we think about a community with alot of members, there will be alot of redundancy (meaning people may search for something that already has an interaction/info/answer/rational). I think what we should do is focus more on making each engagement better (quality wise) for all readers, rather than trying to increase active posters (if we’re talking about an online course/forum).
For more info please see these articles:
Yeow, A., Johnson, S., & Faraj, S. (2006). Lurking: legitimate or illegitimate peripheral participation?. ICIS 2006 Proceedings, 62.
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/301354819.pdfSun, N., Rau, P. P. L., & Ma, L. (2014). Understanding lurkers in online communities: A literature review. Computers in Human Behavior, 38, 110-117.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563214003008 (no link via google scholar, please use an available online library)Thanks
TedWhen learners attention drifts away from tasks (something called mind wandering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind-wandering#:~:text=The%20history%20of%20%EE%80%80mind-wandering%EE%80%81%20research) its important to understand what attentional resources are at play. In general attention resources (and other attention evidence based theories) suggest that if there is no actual demand for attention, such as a needed task, then it will drift. This raises alot of questions about what demands have been given to the learner, if they are fully aware of the demands needed, whether or not additional demands can be provided, etc. If someone was more interested in this they could review research such as the literature on attention theory, and any human factors research related to it. For example here is a link to an abstract that pertains to recent attention-based research (and researchgate/sciencedirect may also be helpful places) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1071181319631506?journalCode=proe
My recommendation for mind wandering would be the following:
1. To avoid mind wandering – ensure at the planning step that more variation of a learning activity/task can be generated easily (such as ChatGPT assisting with infinitely creating problems
2. Measure mind wandering and attentiveness – self reports, webcam/software to perform visual tracking, etc.
3. Adjust demands – not only creating more is an option (as stated above), but desirable difficulty, multiple representations, can be important. One method of providing difficulty could be providing near but incorrect examples (erroneous examples), having a GenAI tool assist in creating them could also assist.
4. Assess if the learner is overwhelmed – generally if cognitive load is exceeded people may space out or disengage, often as a way to reduce cognitive load. You can assess if they are overwhelmed by reducing tasks and seeing if they are then more attentive and capable (for example just doing 1 task at a time).From my previous studies in Human Factors, my professor recommended a model called SITE for examining phenomenon (in addition to doing research). SITE essentially means we should look at the outcomes we see, as the consequence of the system. We should look at things in the following way Situational factors (S), impact the individual (I) on some kind of level(cognitive, etc.), which then influence the task (T) (learning/performance/behaviour), which then influence the effect (outcome of the system, which could be all children bored). The key in SITE is to understand the relationship between variables enough to be able to change S (situation) based factors to ensure that the flow on effects work in the intended direction.
Hope this helps
Thanks
TedWhen people are drifting off, this is called mind wandering (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind-wandering). In general mind wandering is caused by failures to prime and maintain attention.
To maintain attention/vigilance we can do the following:
1.From attentional resource theory – we can impose a demand on the learner (such as a learning task). Remember that the withdrawal of demands will reduce attention (unless they are fatigued). In my opinion aside from starting easy – it’s generally better to have high demands with high breaks than it is to have low demands constantly.
2.From cognitive load theory – we can review if mind wandering is occurring as a way to reduce cognitive load (we can divide tasks up and see if they take off, if simplification/segmentation works then we probably are needing to review the task and difficulty).
3.From the testing effect – we can review our format to ensure that regular recurring events prime for future attention (if a person knows they will be tested, they are more likely to dedicate better attentional processes to a learning)
Frome boredom research – we can ensure there is difficulty changes, visual changes, and variation within a task and topic. Generally, if structural and surface components are too similar, people perceive no difference and eventually boredom increases (the sameness hypothesis).Also I’ll just add that looking at things in a SITE way can help alot. SITE was a framework I was taught when I studied Human Factors. SITE basically goes like this:
Situational factors (S) influence Individual characteristics (I) which influence Task (T) which dictate the overall effect (E).
In this sense, looking at all interactions as a system, if we have a strong understanding of SITE we can manipulate situational factors to always have the individual responses (cognitive factors) we want, the task performance/learning we want, and the overall effect we want. In this sense if we look back at our design process (for before learning, during, and after) we can be more likely to enhance the attentional process and learning outcomes.Also if your interested in attention I recommend learning about:
1. Attentional resource theory
2. Attention/vigilance literature reviews (often human factors is a good umbrella to look at, not so much nueroscience)
3. Human information processing model (basically attention comes first in any learning/processing events).I had posted a response, but for some reason the forum seems to be eating them.
“Your discussion forum is starting to feel like a ghost town, with only a couple of brave souls posting. How would you lure those ‘invisible’ students out of hiding?”
I wouldn’t attempt to pull invisible students out for participation. Heres why:
1.There is research on community of practice lurkers – individuals who dont participate but just access and read information – and they are not bad or a threat to the community, infect the largest communities, such as researchgate, have the highest amount of lurkers. A high lurker count actually means there is a large group of people who are interested in the topic.
2. Lurking is the natural consequence – when a community gets large, it also gets redundant (the same topic has already been covered). Therefore lurking is likely to increase with the size of the community.
3. Lurking can mean that the community forum is working – by having a forum that accessible, understandable, and insightful – there may be no need for further interaction.
4. Lurkers often identify themselves as community members. People may see them as negative, but they see themselves as participating as they are partaking.
5. Pulling lurkers out, again may perpetuate the untrue and negative stereotypes, such as that lurkers are essentially a bad group of people who are intellectual thief’s and free riders.
For more info see the following links/resources:
Sun, N., Rau, P. P. L., & Ma, L. (2014). Understanding lurkers in online communities: A literature review. Computers in Human Behavior, 38, 110-117.
Yeow, A., Johnson, S., & Faraj, S. (2006). Lurking: legitimate or illegitimate peripheral participation?. ICIS 2006 Proceedings, 62.Thanks
TedProbably best to have a catchup with this person personally to check:
1. Reason for doing so
2. Their long term goals
3. Appropriateness of any further supportive activities (maybe it has nothing to do with an additional assignment).I think if we are talking about adult learning and continued learning, if they are interested, then options such as discussing membership into relevant societies/communities may be suitable. Networking can sorta help as well, again very much based on what goals this person has (as long as theres no clear quality issues).
Thanks
TedMy go to plan would be based on evidence based practices that would help identify scope and severity of issue.
My plan to identify issues would include:
1. Active retrieval/free recall on all related criteria (content, order, and time – much easier to use if a visual guide is present)
2. Rapid assessment of learning (slava kalyuga protocol) – full mentalization process, steps they write down tell me the limit
3. Assess in desirable difficulty stages
4. Identification of human error type (mistake, lapse, violations). Mistakes mean they misunderstand or do not know a rule (misconceptions fall into this category also), lapse means they know but failed in execution, violation means they know the rule but intentionally disregarded it.My design plan would be:
1. Have a pre-learning test (prior knowledge measurement)
2. Measure cognitive load during pre, during, and after learning (build in via self report, timed events that can be automatically captured)
2. Have visuals to support learning
3. Have question types grouped and labelled by difficulty and by principles learnt (both singular and similar)
4. Have a plan of materials that can go backwards if learners fail (returns back to last concept but has different surface details).