Maintaining attention during instruction is challenging as children face various sources of distraction (peers, announcements, noise) as well as competition from the visual environment itself. Prior studies found decorated environments promote off-task behavior and reduce learning. Additionally, many classroom displays are not relevant to ongoing instruction. This raises the possibility that increasing alignment between displays and instructional content may afford opportunities for incidental learning, reducing the detrimental effects of environmental off-task behavior. To investigate this possibility, participants completed a lesson in which alignment between the lesson content and displays was manipulated (relevant, educational but irrelevant, or no displays). Attention to the lesson and learning gains for content presented in the lesson and/or displays were measured. Results suggest younger children’s learning can benefit from displays that reinforce the lesson content. However, there was no evidence of incidental learning from displays without additional lesson support. Implications for classroom design are discussed.

Given that attention is a limited capacity resource we are onlyable to selectively attend to a small subset of information atany one time. Endogenously regulating attention during aninstructional activity is effortful and can be challenging forchildren as well as adults. Although improvements inattention regulation have been documented with age, less isknown about the duration of time individuals are able toselectively sustain attention during instruction, due in part tomethodological limitations. The present study leverages eye-tracking technology to provide an objective examination ofattentional decay during a lecture. Adult participants (N=96)watched a geography screencast lecture while a mobile eye-tracker was utilized to measure changes in attention over thecourse of the lecture. Results indicate that attention declinesover time and reductions in attention occur before Minute 15.Implications for instruction are discussed.

Understanding the nuanced relationship between attention andlearning in young children is difficult due to the lack ofdevelopmentally appropriate measures of attention. Youngchildren are in a measurement gap - they are too old formeasures typically employed with infants and toddlers andoften too young to produce useful data from more traditionalmeasures used with older children and adults. Due to thepaucity of developmentally appropriate measures it ischallenging to employ best practices and utilize convergingmeasures of attention. Additionally, existing behavioralobservation methods are time consuming and can suffer frompoor reliability due to their subjective nature. The presentstudy aims to address these limitations by leveragingaffordable technology to create a novel measure of attention,the Wiggleometer. The Wiggleometer is a custom chair thatcovertly measures body movement as an index of attention.The preliminary results help establish the concurrent validityof the measure and suggest the Wiggleometer can beemployed to better predict children’s learning outcomes.

Brain breaks are often used during lessons to replenish childrens' attention, but children may respond differently to the variety of brain breaks they are offered. Therefore, two studies were conducted to identify both teachers' current use of brain breaks (Study 1) as well as the types of brain breaks children prefer (Study 2). Study 1 consisted of a survey of K-2 teachers (N = 796) across the United States regarding the implementation and types of brain breaks commonly used in their classrooms. The three most common break types reported by teachers were physical activity breaks, videos, and dancing. Study 2 consisted of a forced choice task in which elementary- and middle-school students were asked to pick between two instantiations of six different break types: cognitive engagement breaks, mindfulness exercises, physical activity breaks, nature videos, coloring, and mind wandering. For each break type, children were asked to pick the instantiation they preferred as well as the one they believed would help them focus. Children were then asked to rank the six breaks they selected from most to least preferred and most to least beneficial for focusing. Data collection is ongoing (N = 53). Preliminary results revealed children were more likely to rank cognitive engagement breaks as their most preferred break type. Analyses within break type revealed that students preferred mazes over pattern blocks as a cognitive engagement break, color jump over calisthenics for physical activity breaks, videos of forest scenery over cows grazing for a nature video break, mandala coloring over abstract coloring as a coloring break, and viewing a poster of a starry sky over an abstract poster as a mind wandering break.

There is a growing body of research experimentally demonstrating a relationship between selective sustained attention and young children’s learning outcomes. Collectively, this work has documented that as selective sustained attention decreases children’s learning also declines. However, a precise understanding of how disrupted attention negatively impacts learning is lacking. The present experiment expands upon the existing work and explores three potential mechanisms by which inattention may impede learning: 1) inattention may disrupt encoding of the individual features of the stimulus, 2) inattention may impede children from binding the features together, or 3) inattention may disrupt both feature encoding and binding

Prior research in laboratory settings suggests highly decoratedlearning environments reduce attention to instructional taskshampering learning. However, systematic research examininghow the visual environment relates to children’s on-taskbehavior in genuine learning environments is more rare. Thus,it is unknown whether prior laboratory findings can beextended to genuine classrooms and what specific aspects ofthe visual environment might pose a challenge for children’sattention regulation and learning. This study aims to (1)provide a nuanced examination of specific elements of theclassroom visual environment (e.g., visual noise, quantity ofposters, color darkness, color variability, adherence to generaldesign principles) by analyzing panoramic photographs of 58classrooms, and (2) investigate whether specific elements ofthe visual environment are related to rates of on-taskbehavior. Results indicate on-task behavior declined inclassrooms containing greater visual noise.

Learning to read is often considered the most important skill taughtin school because reading is a gateway to other learning. Manychildren struggle to acquire this fundamental skill. Suboptimaldesign of books for beginning readers may contribute to thedifficulties children experience as close proximity between textand illustrations could promote attentional competition hamperingliteracy skills. The present work utilized eye-tracking technologyto examine how beginning readers allocate attention and whetherthese patterns are related to fluency (Experiment 1) andcomprehension (Experiment 2). Results suggest when readingbooks in which text and illustrations are in close proximity,children frequently shift attention away from the text. This patternof attention was negatively associated with fluency, but notassociated with comprehension. This line of research aims toprovide theoretical insights about design principles for readingmaterials that can be employed to optimize instructional materialsand promote literacy development in young children.

Proficiency in math is critically important given its implications for education and daily life (e.g., finances, health). However, math is a challenging subject, and proficiency requires a complex interplay of content knowledge and general cognitive processes, including Executive Function (EF). In this exploratory study, we used heat maps to examine whether participants' self-reported attention to strategy-specific components of fraction arithmetic equations (i.e., operations, numerators, denominators) was related to their EF and task performance. Our results indicated that participants with stronger EF (indexed by a numerical stroop task) obtained higher fraction arithmetic scores and were also more likely to attend to strategy-specific components in the fraction problems. Additionally, a positive correlation was found between participants’ selection of strategy-specific components and their fraction arithmetic accuracy. Keywords: Fraction arithmetic; Strategy Reports; Executive Function; Inhibitory Control; Attention

Learning to read is a critical skill; yet only a small portion of children in the United States are reading at or above grade level. Attention is one crucial process that affects the acquisition of reading skills. The process involves selectively choosing task relevant information and requires monitoring competing demands. Many books for beginning readers include illustrations, but this design choice may require learners to split their attention between multiple sources of information. This study employed eye tracking to examine whether embedding text within illustrations in children’s e-books inadvertently induces attentional competition. The results showed that spatially separating illustrations from the text in beginning reader books reduces attentional competition and improves children’s reading comprehension. This study shows that changes to the design of books for beginning readers can help promote literacy development in children.

This preregistered study examined whether extraneous illustration details promote attentional competition and hinder reading comprehension in beginning readers. Reading comprehension was highest in the Streamlined Condition (text + relevant illustrations) compared to a Standard Condition (text + relevant illustrations + extraneous illustrations) and Text Only Condition (no illustrations). Gaze shifts away from the text were highest in the Standard Condition, indicating increased distractibility while reading text with extraneous illustration details. Gaze shifts away from the text were associated with performance on an independent measure of attention, validating eye gaze patterns as an assessment of attentional allocation while reading. Lower comprehension in the Standard Condition was associated with higher gaze shifts away from text and lower scores on the independent measure of selective attention. This study suggests that illustrations can support reading comprehension, but only when they are optimally designed. Importantly, the removal of extraneous details did not decrease book enjoyment.