Question pedagogy and learner attention [Thesis]

To learn, you need to pay attention! But attention is a skill that fewer people are cultivating these days, young and old alike, due to the invasion of screens into our daily lives. Since the 1990s, the problem of attention has become so acute that learners are finding it hard to concentrate.

Questions - or the beginnings of solutions, one might say - are coming from all sides: should schools adapt to this new situation by finding participative strategies to capture the attention of learners, given that it is up to them to train future adults?

The pedagogy adopted for this analysis is that of the question. This raises the question:

• "In what way is the pedagogy of the question one of the strategic pedagogical interventions for attracting students' attention?
• Does it guarantee the development of critical thinking and the acquisition of working methods for better understanding and learning?
• For greater effectiveness, what does this method need to be combined with?"

1- On attention and learning: state-of-the-art presentation

From the Latin "attendere", meaning "to tend towards", attention has several meanings, the most coherent of which, in this context, refers to the concentration of one's mind on a precise object. In other words, it's hardly possible to simultaneously focus one's curiosity on several poles, as Broadbent's model specifies. Put this way, you'd think there'd be an exact measure of attention. This is not quite true, however, as a number of parameters make this impossible, including memory management, planning, emotional state and degree of anxiety, to name but a few.

If all these indicators are at a standstill, it's possible that the learner has difficulty concentrating or suffers from attention deficit disorder. In both cases, the manifestations are based on inattention, restlessness and impulsivity, the only difference being that in the second case, the disorder is diagnosed by competent people. And yet every individual needs this rare commodity to remember past events and project themselves into the future to complete a given task.

There are several types of attention, but in the context of teaching we distinguish two categories:

• selective attention, consisting of directed and divided attention, and
• intensive attention, which includes vigilance and sustained attention.

Knowledge of these categories of attention is an asset that enables educators to better develop their pedagogy.

In the process of managing attention, certain senses are essential. Hearing, for example, is the key to auditory attention. This form of concentration reveals a distinction between hearing and listening. The former is involuntary, while the latter is characterized by the subject's willingness to focus his or her attention on a specific object, ignoring other stimuli in the environment.

Concentration is a four-step process:

• "Stop": the student pauses to listen to the instruction;
• "Look": encourages students to look where they need to;
• "Question": the language internalization stage;
• "Decide": here the learner compares information, going back and forth between the object of perception and the mental representation.

The aim of this procedure is to limit cognitive overload. In other words, to achieve the highest degree of concentration and successful completion of tasks, the teacher is advised to offer the learner one piece of information at a time, to automate processing, and to propose short tasks, among other things.

In addition to the educator's guidance, the learner himself can learn to control the direction of his attention, thanks to the ATOLE attention program, which helps the child react to distraction in the following way:

• "I let myself be distracted",
• "I notice it" and
• "I react".

2- Sampling and study conclusions

Using a sample of five classes, including two classes of 6e and three of 3e at the public collège Lamartine, comprising 24 and 28 students with varying degrees of concentration difficulties, the teacher makes questioning during class activities central to learning, with a view to maintaining learners' attention.

Through observation during the experimentation session with question-based pedagogy, the following results emerged:

• Question pedagogy has a positive effect on students when used regularly;
  
  
• Contrary to the hypothesis, question-based teaching does not encourage critical thinking or the acquisition of a working method for better learning and understanding. Rather, it enhances comprehension, among other effects;
  
  
• Unexpectedly, the effectiveness of this method does not depend on its combination with other strategic interventions.

Illustration: MJSS - Pixabay

Reference

Albine Migard. Attention et apprentissage : pédagogie de la question et stratégies d'apprentissage pour favoriser l'attention des élèves. Education. 2020. - Master2 thesis
https://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-03170873/document