Studies foreign
A growing number of books, including The Shallows, argue that the internet and digital gadgets are making it harder for us to concentrate. The Pew Research Centre in America recently surveyed almost 2,500 teachers and found that 77% thought that the internet had a "mostly positive" impact on students' research work, while 87% felt modern technologies were creating an "easily distracted generation with short attention spans".
But could this simply be the latest variation of 'the Elvis Hypothesis' – because something is new, popular with young people, and challenges existing hierarchies and traditions, it must be bad?
Although some UK teachers might be inclined to agree with their American counterparts when faced with a class of restless smartphone-enabled year 10s, there appears to be no conclusive evidence that pupil attention spans are declining.
Sue Honoré, an independent learning consultant who co-authored the 2009 report 'Generation Y: Inside Out' with Dr. Carina Paine Schofield, feels that there is still "a big question about how technology is impacting on the way we behave". She studied the behaviours of people born between 1982 and 2002 – particularly how they learn and work – and found "mixed results" in terms of attention spans.
While young people are "undoubtedly capable of long periods of concentration", those who spend a lot of time alone using technology "tend to have less in the way of communication skills, self-awareness and emotional intelligence." She adds: "That's not because they don't have the capabilities. But because they are spending so much time communicating remotely with people rather than face-to-face, when they come into situations where they have to work with others, they appear not to concentrate on people."
Another recent study carried out by Dr Karina Linnell in the department of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, examined the effects of urbanisation on the attention spans of the Himba, a remote Namibian tribe. A group of Himba who lived a traditional existence in the open bush were compared with a group who had moved to a nearby town, and the 'urbanised' British research team.
"We tested them on selective attention tasks like driving or listening to a teacher in class – the traditional mode of delivery, where you need to pay attention to one stream of information and ignore any distractions," she says. While the urbanised Himba group were roughly comparable to the researchers in terms of their attention spans, Dr Linnell was "staggered" by how good the traditional Himba were at concentrating on one activity for long periods.
She argues it is "intuitively reasonable" to suggest that this has something to do with the level of stimulation inherent in the groups' everyday environments: low in the case of the traditional Himba, and relatively high in the case of the urbanised group and research team. "Obviously you need to be awake to a certain extent, you need to be aroused to do something that's demanding. But there comes a limit: one can be so aroused that one's ability to do a task, or concentrate, begins to fall off."

Although the study focused on urban environments, few would contradict that children today are growing up in a hyper-stimulating world. So could this be making it difficult for some pupils to concentrate in traditional chalk-and-talk lesson?

LITERATURE FOREIGN
According to the New York Times, many scientists say that "people's ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information".[22]
From 53,573 page views taken from various users, 17% of the views lasted less than 4 seconds while 4% lasted more than 10 minutes. In regards to page content, users will only read 49% of a site that contains 111 words or fewer while users will opt to read 28% of an average website (approximately 593 words). For each additional 100 words on a site, users will spend 4.4 seconds longer on the site.[23]
Although attention span has been decreasing over time (decreased from 12 seconds to 8 seconds in 2000-2012),[23] it is found that those who read articles online go through the article more thoroughly than those who read from print-based materials. Upon choosing their reading material, almost 66% of people who opt to read online would read the entire piece as opposed to stopping midway.

According to Psychology Today,
“Attention span refers to the amount of time we can focus on a task before we start to ‘zone out’. Although a distracting background or a really boring lecture/meeting can definitely make anyone’s attention span run thin, for some people focusing on even the simplest of tasks for a few moments can be torture.”

Despite the popular belief that students have “short” attention spans ranging from 10 to 15 minutes, there is considerable evidence to suggest otherwise.
In a 2007 literature review, psychologists Karen Wilson and James H. Korn concluded there is little evidence to support this belief. The evidence they did find was shallow and imprecise. For example, after finding that student note-taking generally declines over the duration of a lecture, the researchers of one study expressed support for the attention span theory. But, as Wilson and Korn point out, they found no direct evidence of a consistent 10 to 15 minute attention span.
In another study of student attention, trained observers watched students during a lecture and recorded perceived breaks in attention. They noted attention lapses during the initial minutes of “settling-in,” again at 10-18 minutes into lecture, and then as frequently as every 3-4 minutes toward the end of class.
Wilson and Korn are quick to remind us that observers may not be able to accurately measure students’ attention spans, and that while there may be a pattern of decline in student attention during a lecture, the exact length of the average attention span wasn’t determined.