Suppose you are an elementary school teacher. What developmental trends and individual differences in attention might be useful for you to know about in making curricular decisions and developing individual learning plans?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

(a) Younger children are notorious for having a shorter attention span than older children. The fact that the capacity for sustained attention continues to improve throughout childhood and early adolescence is one factor that could affect curricular decisions and expectations. These improvements have been linked to the slow, late myelinization of the reticular formation. (b) Visual scanning becomes more systematic and exhaustive, meaning that older children are likely to explore all the input before making a discrimination, to detect subtle differences, and to find missing object skills that help them in many school tasks. The complexity of material that we present, the subtlety of distinctions we expect children to detect, the time needed to detect differences, the amount of information needed to make an identification, and the amount of guidance children require in what to attend to will vary markedly with the grade level. (c) Children improve with age in their ability to selectively attend to only the input that is relevant at the moment, making older children much more efficient information processors. (d) There are also marked individual differences in the deployment of attention. In the extreme are children diagnosed as having ADHD. These children typically show short attention spans and have great difficulty in systematic scanning and in selective attention, deficits that markedly affect their ability to function well in the school environment. They can be helped through the use of stimulant drugs and behavioral interventions.