Selective attention to lesson‐relevant contextual information promotes 3‐ to 5‐year‐old children's learning

Abstract

Attending to distracting or competing information is typically considered detrimental to learning, but the presence of competing information can also facilitate learning when it is relevant to ongoing task goals. Educational settings often contain contextual elements such as classroom decorations or visual aids to enhance student learning.Despite this, most research examining effects of contextual information on children's learning has only utilized lesson-irrelevant stimuli. While this research has shown that increased looking to task-irrelevant information hinders learning, the extent to which looking to lesson-relevant information can benefit children's learning is unknown. We addressed this question by examining 3-to 5-year-old children's attention to and learning from lesson-relevant contextual information. We recorded children's eye movements as they viewed video science lessons while lesson-relevant and -irrelevant images appeared in the periphery. We assessed learning based on improvements in content knowledge following the video lessons and separately measured selective attention skills using the Track-It task. Children overall spent more time looking at lesson-relevant versus -irrelevant images, and those with more initial knowledge of the lesson topics or more advanced selective attention skills showed increased preferential looking to the relevant images. This increased preferential looking to lessonrelevant images related to more effective learning during trials in which both relevant and irrelevant images were present. These results suggest that the effects of competing contextual information on early learning depend on the relationship between information content and task goals, as well as children's ability to actively select taskrelevant information from their environment.

Individual differences in selective attention and engagement shape students’ learning from visual cues and instructor presence during online lessons

“…This result is consistent with past evidence that more advanced attention skills facilitated learning from lessons that required integrating information from multiple sources (i.e., text and corresponding illustrations; Baadte et al, 2015). King & Markant (2022) similarly found that children with more advanced selective attention looked longer at illustrations that were relevant to ongoing lessons, which in turn facilitated enhanced learning. Conversely, individuals with poorer selective attention SELECTIVE ATTENTION DURING ONLINE LESSONS 22 learned less from video lessons that included the instructor video and spent more time looking to the instructor during these lessons (Kokoç et al, 2020), suggesting that inefficient selective attention may make it more difficult for students to attend to primary lesson content when the instructor is present.…”

“…Participants first completed a learning task in which they viewed four prerecorded video lessons that conveyed novel content about the lives of fictional alien families (see Supplementary Materials for details). We developed novel lesson content to control for baseline subject knowledge because prior studies have linked individual differences in baseline knowledge to learning outcomes (e.g., Arslan-Ari, 2018;Johnson et al, 2015;King & Markant, 2022). Our pilot study (N = 25) confirmed that the lesson content was appropriately difficult, as participants showed overall successful learning but below ceiling performance (MAccuracy = .75, SD = .11; see…”

“…Individuals with more efficient selective attention can selectively focus on information that is relevant to ongoing lessons, whereas those with poorer selective attention can be more susceptible to poor learning outcomes (e.g., Hanley et al, 2017;Rey, 2014). Individuals with more advanced selective attention skills can also more effectively allocate attention to relevant information in the surrounding context (e.g., illustrations) during multimedia lessons (Baadte et al, 2015;King & Markant, 2022). These findings suggest that individual differences in selective attention skills may affect how students process additional visual features, such as instructor presence, during multimedia lessons.…”

Individual differences in selective attention and engagement shape students’ learning from visual cues and instructor presence during online lessons

“…This result is consistent with evidence that more advanced attention skills facilitated learning from lessons that required integrating information from multiple sources (i.e., text and corresponding illustrations 72 ). King and Markant 73 similarly found that children with more advanced selective attention looked longer at illustrations that were relevant to ongoing lessons, which in turn facilitated learning. Conversely, individuals with poorer selective attention learned less from video lessons that included the instructor video and looked longer at the instructor during these lessons 15 , suggesting that students with inefficient selective attention may have more difficulty attending to primary lesson content when the instructor is present.…”

“… 19 , 71 ). Individuals with more advanced selective attention skills can also more effectively allocate attention to relevant information in the surrounding context (e.g., illustrations) during multimedia lessons 72 , 73 . These findings suggest that individual differences in selective attention skills may affect how students process additional visual features, such as visual cues and instructor presence, during multimedia lessons.…”