Student Research Report: Children Have the Ability to Pay Attention
In Fall 2021, students in Dr. Emily Stark’s Research Methods and Design course completed multiple hands-on data collection projects. They were also assigned a blog paper where they discussed one of the topics they chose to research and explained their findings to a general audience. The goal of this assignment was to give students an opportunity to explore a different form of writing from APA-style research papers. Some of these blog papers will be featured here throughout the spring to showcase the students’ findings. Please feel free to contact Dr. Stark through the contact form on this site for additional information about this course or the assignments used.
By Megan O’Connor
Young children are easily distracted, everyone knows that. An opinion that is prevalent in society is that some people think that young females have higher potential of being able to pay attention compared to males. This may be because of the ongoing comments about “girls maturing faster” or “growing up faster than boys” and others along those lines. Over the years, attention span tests have been a common topic researchers have looked into with the intention to figure out what can be implied/ changed in school classrooms to increase attention span in these children. One experiment that I investigated was done by Mahone & Snyder (2012) where they looked into attention problems in preschoolers aged four to five years old. This study suggested that considering a child as having “disordered attention” is very difficult at this age because becoming distracted is so prevalent among this age group. After running tests dealing with visual attention, number recall, spatial span, etc., they found that preschoolers struggled most with visual selective attention (looking at and memorizing a picture and recalling later) along with auditory verbal span (recalling single syllable numbers).
When it comes to gender differences, studies have been conducted over the years to see if any of these findings are significant. As stated in a post on Emcyclopedia.com, Attention Span (2021), it is noted that during preschool through elementary school, attention span differs because of factors including age, gender and activity type. When considering the factor of gender, the article states that a longer span of attention is more prevalent in older children as well as young girls compared to males.
To put this to the test, I analyzed attention span in children aged from 13-66 months old at the daycare I am employed at. This experiment was conducted for the course PSYC 211W Research Methods and Design, a course at Minnesota State University, Mankato to examine attention span. To do this in an organized manner I split the children into three groups consisting of one being the ages of 13-25 months, one with 26–40-month-olds, and the last with 41-66 month-olds. Within each group I observed the kids interacting in ‘circle time’ where the lead teacher in the classroom reads them a story. The story chosen to read at the center is aimed to be appealing to both boys and girls, so all students could be intrigued. When sitting in on the class, I picked out four boys and four girls per room to keep eyes on while this was occurring. Since I have worked there over the past year and a half, I have become very familiar with the way the kids behave daily. I tried to select children that seemed to be acting ‘normal’ so to speak and not one who seemed to be mad or sad that day because this could mess with their behavior and become a factor towards their attention. Every time any of the chosen children’s attention was divided, I made note of it until I had all my data from the eight kids in the room. Before I conducted my experiment, I hypothesized that the older age group would have a greater attention span because they have experienced more, and their brains were more developed. Along with this, I also hypothesized that the young females time of attention would dominate those of the males because of statements I’ve heard over the years mentioning that females grow faster than their male counterparts. My results showed a significant result regarding the age of the children showing that the older the child was, the greater their attention span time. However, there was no significant effect when looking into gender of the participants. This study did have limitations such as only studying kids within one center and who live in the same general location around the Mankato area. Further research could lead to more conclusive findings, especially with a larger sample size.
As a childcare worker who sees kids that are full of potential with minds that are more imaginative than it ever will be, I believe that these kinds of studies are important and should be implicated in society. Knowing and observing how kids behave and interact is a huge part of finding how to create an environment that children will be able to thrive in. Taking these studies into. consideration could lead to changing activities and learning criteria that will help children engage much easier in a classroom setting.
References
Mahone, E. M., & Schneider, H. E. (2012). Assessment of attention in preschoolers. Neuropsychology Review, 22(4), 361-383. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11065-012-9217-y
Encyclopedia.com. (2021, November 28). ." Child development. . encyclopedia.com. 25 Oct. 2021 . Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved November 28, 2021, from https://www.encyclopedia.com/children/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/attention-span