International Teacher Education Conference 2014 1

International Teacher Education Conference 2014
becoming more creative due to the restrictions placed on us by companies such as Twitter to read/create the
news or a message in 140 characters or less.
One way to monitor people´s concentration is to use attention span studies. Although they differ in the exact
number of minutes or seconds of what actually takes place, and the fact that Wilson and Korn have found that
many of them have been imprecise, [28] they can give us a general overview of what is happening in a classroom
or auditorium. More specifically we have to clarify if we are referring to short-term focused attention or more
sustained attention and take into consideration such influences as the type of stimuli being introduced, the type
of interaction between participants, what part of the day it is and if the audience/students are enjoying
themselves. Although a university class can last up to 90 minutes, some top end studies show that an
audience/class can only keep some sort of sustained attention up to 40 minutes by refocusing on the same thing.
Nevertheless, in Figures 3 and 4, you can see that even for the same agreed-upon period of time (40 minutes),
there are various findings and interpretations of what actually takes place during that time, and no agreement on
the position of the attention span at the beginning and end of a session.
Figure 3 The 40-minute attention span - example 1 [20]
Figure 4 The 40-minute attention span – example 2 [5]
More conservatively, some experts on giving (Power Point) presentations recommend keeping them down to
about half that time before an audience’s attention drops, (See Figure 5).
1013