“What do mobile phones, loud radios and DVD players in cars, as well as high traffic, passengers, and other modern elements mean for driver attention to actual driving? If it is available to you, try going into a room that has a radio, TV, and any other distraction you can find. Now try to do your multiplication tables through 12. How much cognitive load can a driver handle while remaining effective at his/her task? Now, think about this in terms of the noise of an educational environment? How much noise is useful during learning? How much interferes with attention and consciousness. How should this impact the design of a learning environment? How much should it?”
Drivers who distract themselves with cell phones and dvd players might begin to develop an ability to process more audio and visual stimulation at a time, but there are other ways to develop that ability which do not involve the risk of rapid deceleration trauma. Auto insurance companies, when settling claims, will ask drivers about distractions they might have had at the time. There is no educational equivalent to auto insurance companies to try to determine what causes poor academic performance, and who should be penalized. At the moment, drivers (neighbor’s kid and his friends) are distracting me as I write this. They work to make their cars as loud as possible, which makes it harder to write this post. They also like to speed in what is otherwise a quiet residential neighborhood and they make me anxious for cats, dogs and kids in the neighborhood.
I find that it while it is difficult for me to do my multiplication tables while listening to a podcast and the radio, I don’t think that this would be difficult for everyone. Some educators claim that students can track more stimuli/media at a time than used to be the case. On the other hand, it may be more difficult for a student to stay focused on one task or signal if they become bored, even in the absence of distractions. Students with ADHD are easily distracted and can seem inattentive to directions and details.
Some noise in an environment may be healthy, to develop cognitive vigilance, selective attention, and the ability to search and filter information. These are skills that can be developed with practice. It is probably not necessary to install noise in an educational system because it will occur naturally in the process of putting a group of students together. My college library, when I was an undergraduate had a rather special set up . Orange and blue striped carpeting, purple couches, tree houses, were all rumored to have been part of some scheme to aid studying. They changed it during my senior year, perhaps because 19 years of bright colors probably did not correlate with improved graduation rates, but I don’t know. I found the library a rather distracting place to study when I was there. When the color scheme was updated, I remember that I started to sit nearer the front door to watch who came and went. This did not help me study, because I was able to chat with everyone I knew as they passed. It was as if I was trying to inject noise back into my personal educational system after the university had remodeled the library to reduce noise.
Many academic libraries have designated “quiet areas” in order to allow individuals to work quietly, while accommodating increasingly common group study/projects in other areas. This design is ideal, because it allows tiered levels of noise depending on the needs of the students.
Tags: attention, cognition, consciousness, educational design
