A Draining Dependency: How the Pandemic Reduced Student Attention and Learning Quality

• In Event: Addressing Educational Challenges: Justice, Rural Higher Ed, Pandemic Impact, Attention Economy, and Urban Gentrification

Abstract

During the pandemic, many parents found that allowing their children to use a phone at a higher rate than before proved the lesser of two evils—the other being exposure to deadly disease. Though most countries are no longer experiencing extreme rates of infection and death, studies have found that the pandemic continues to have a significant impact on student learning—especially for elementary and middle students. The decrease in reading and math scores, the increase of educational inequity, and the widening learning disparities due to socioeconomic inequalities prompt essential investigations into the best solutions to bridging these issues (Lewis).
Thus, this paper’s aim was to highlight the correlation between virtual teaching and the decline of children’s attention in the past few years; despite the wide variety of research and data on the learning deficit, none of them definitively explain the direct association between the pandemic and attention-span due to the pandemic’s recency. Measuring the impact of technology on children would require years. This paper drew on a large body of literature, including journals, online articles, and interviews with rising high school seniors in the tri-state area to gain firsthand insights on the pandemic’s effect on learning.
For some students, the main factor affecting education quality has been spending more time in the online world, a place where attention is easily stolen. For others, difficulties in learning were simply attributed to a lack of access to computers and resources. Most experts propose year-round schools and increasing tutoring to return reading and writing levels back to pre-pandemic times (MacGillis). However, these options prove inaccessible to the large part of the world. In lieu of expensive and inaccessible options for individual families, this paper proposes further research into the pandemic’s effect on particularly children’s attention span and learning quality. The paper’s scholarly significance lies in its argument in how attention span plays a large role in the pandemic’s learning deficit and draws on theories like Attention Restoration Theory to provide valuable insight on future approaches to learning.

Author

• Claire Jiang, The Lawrenceville School