Teaching in the Age of Distraction: Why Students Can’t Focus – And What Educators Should Do About It - Dr. Gloria Mark, Author of Attention Span

In a world of digital overload, short-form media, and AI-powered personalization, staying focused has never been harder. Today, the average attention span on any screen is just 47 seconds. What's causing this decline in focus, and what should educators do about it?

Those are some of the questions we discuss with Dr. Gloria Mark, UC Irvine informatics professor and author of Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity. 

Dr. Mark explains the psychology behind attention, including the difference between controlled and automatic processing, the role of self-regulation, and how sleep debt, stress and individual cognitive rhythms factor into a student's ability to concentrate. She also points to a growing trend in education: designing classroom content to accommodate short attention spans, which may be unintentionally reinforcing them.

The conversation also takes a timely turn into how AI tools—from TikTok’s recommender systems to ChatGPT—are changing the way students interact with information, and what that means for deep learning, retention, and even courage in the classroom.

Listen to learn:

• Why shrinking attention spans aren’t your fault—and what’s really driving them
• How schools may be unintentionally reinforcing short-form thinking
• What AI and automation are doing to deep learning and reflection
• The hidden role of sleep, stress, and self-regulation in attention
• 3 powerful strategies students can use to take back control of their focus

3 Big Takeaways:

1. Short attention spans are not a personal failure—they’re shaped by both individual traits and digital environments.

Gloria distinguishes between controlled and automatic attention, noting that much of our behavior—like checking phones or clicking notifications—happens without conscious thought. These automatic habits are reinforced by our environment, particularly digital technologies that train us to switch rapidly and respond to constant stimuli.

2. Classroom strategies that cater to short attention spans may be doing more harm than good.

Gloria highlights a trend in education toward breaking lectures into smaller chunks or assigning only short passages instead of full books. While well-intentioned, these adaptations risk further weakening students’ ability to engage in long-form content and develop deep, reflective thinking.

3. AI tools like TikTok and ChatGPT are reshaping how students consume and process information—often at the cost of deeper learning.

Platforms driven by recommender algorithms use random reinforcement to keep users engaged, conditioning them for rapid content consumption. In the classroom, reliance on generative AI can create a disconnect between students and the material, undermining “depth of processing” and reducing the cognitive benefits of making mistakes.

Resources in this Episode:

• Official website of Dr. Gloria Mark
• See official show notes page for more resources!

Connect with Dr. Gloria Mark

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Transcript

Matt Kirchner: 0:00

Hi, I'm Matt Kirkner, and it is a another episode of The TechEd Podcast. How many times have we talked about the fact that growing up, I had all of those challenges in traditional education? I couldn't sit still. I couldn't pay attention. I had such a hard time sitting through lectures, watching the clock tick by, sitting in the classroom, I was the poster child for a horrible attention span. Well, guess what? That was years and years, decades ago, as a matter of fact, and the attention span here in the United States of America and around the globe is not getting any better. We are going to talk all about that with today's guest, not just what's happening to our attention span, but why it's happening, and what are some of those strategies that we can use, both individually and perhaps even more importantly, with our students and learners, in terms of managing the shrinking attention span here in the United States and around the globe. It's such a pleasure to introduce to our audience. Our guest for this episode is Dr Gloria mark, the Chancellor's professor emerita of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and author of and we found this book online, actually, and it's really, really good stuff. In fact, I've got it right here. The book is called attention span a groundbreaking way to restore balance happiness and productivity. And it's a pleasure to welcome to the podcast that book's author, Dr Gloria. Mark Gloria, thank you so much for coming on. Well, thank you for having me. Your research absolutely, absolutely fascinates me, and for the reasons that I mentioned in the intro, I've struggled with the short attention span my whole life. I can also tell you that in some ways, and as much as it was a bane while I was going through traditional education, in some cases, it can be a blessing in this day and age as well. So I know we're going to talk about that balance, but let's start with this. You've been at this for a long time. Your research goes back several decades, looking at how people specifically interact with digital devices. So what have you found to be some of that most surprising findings in terms of that research that you've done over the course of two decades and more? Well, I'm not

Gloria Mark: 2:09

sure I would call this surprising, but I would say it reinforced my intuition of what's going on with our attention spans. So I found over a 20 year period that people's attention spans were shrinking, and we we started measuring attention spans empirically, and we started back in 2004 and we found people's attention on a screen, on any screen before switching, is about two and a half minutes, okay? And then over this 20 year period, we found attention spans gradually getting shorter. In 2012 we found them to be 75 seconds on average. And then from the years starting from the years around 2016 averaging 47 seconds. Wow, so that that was, I guess it's a surprise, because when you see the actual data, it's surprising. You might expect that the study would contradict your intuitions, but this time, it was actually shorter than I even expected.

Matt Kirchner: 3:23

Well, and think about over that period of time. I mean, you go from 2004 which is just over 20 years ago, where if I, if I heard you correctly, two and a half minutes was our attention span, where we could pay attention to a screen before having to flip over or move over to whatever the next thing we were looking at was at least on average. And now just 20 years later, that has been, I mean, it was cut in half and almost cut in half again. What's incredible to me is not just the fact that that's happened, but the short period of time over which that has happened. Now I can tell you as somebody who, as I mentioned again in the intro, I was the kid in school that was always like, why can't you pay attention? Why can't you sit still? So I've dealt with this attention span issue my entire life, and I can tell you, at least going through traditional education, maybe it's changed a little bit, but, but you were made to feel like there was something wrong with you that you couldn't pay attention for longer than whatever that period of time was, and that and that, you know, you needed to do this work on your on your own personal self and improve your attention span. I almost felt like a failure in some ways, for not being able to have the attention span that maybe some of the other students did. Should we think about it that way? I mean, is it a personal failure, or is there a way of, kind of thinking about that a little bit

Gloria Mark: 4:33

differently? It's not a personal failure. So first of all, there are individual differences, right? I'm a psychologist, and psychology is based on the idea that people have individual differences. Some people have very good self regulation with their attention. Some people have very poor self regulation, but it should not reflect on you as an individual, right? These are traits that. That we're born with, and if a person has poor self regulation, it doesn't mean they can't do anything about it. And there are also things in the environment that lead us to have short attention spans, and so we can do things about changing our environment. So please, if you know anyone out there feels like they're a failure or feels that they can't perform well because of short attention spans, please understand that there are things you can do to focus better, and

Matt Kirchner: 5:35

I know we're going to get into a number of those things over the course of this episode of The TechEd Podcast. Really looking forward to that, not just for our audience, but quite honestly, Gloria for me personally as well. Now you mentioned some things in our environment that have an impact on our attention spans. What are some examples that you can

Gloria Mark: 5:51

share? Well, for one thing, it's technology. So as you pointed out, I've been studying technology for a very long time. So people develop habits, and a lot of these habits are just automatic. So there's different kinds of attention. There's conscious attention when we're really you know, it's called controlled processing, which means we are in control of our attention. There's also a lot of times when we do things automatically. We do what's called automatic processing. So what do we do automatically? We see our smartphone lying next to us on the table. We pick it up and we swipe it open without thinking, or we see a notification on our computer screen, a news notification, social media notification, we click on it without even thinking. And so these are examples of how there's so many things we do automatically. We're just not conscious of it. And these are habits. They become deeply ingrained habits in us that make us hard to have longer periods of focus. You

Matt Kirchner: 7:10

know, you think back to even like the studies related to Pavlov's dog and a bell going off and this automatic response, and I see, you know, one of my things in meetings these days, and our teams and our ed tech companies will tell you that that I am almost dictatorial in terms of like, when we're in a meeting together, virtual or in person, this is not the time to be checking email, not the time to be looking at text, not the time to be, you know, whatever's alerting you on your phone. And we'll our rule is, actually, we'll stop the meeting for you if you've got something that's so important that can't wait until the end of the meeting that you have to look at or you have to respond to, and we mean it honestly, then we'll stop the meeting for you. Really, really important to me, to make sure people are locked in, and you can just tell the tension that puts in people that are used to every time the phone vibrates and they're looking at what that text is, or what have you that response to, whether it's the bell that goes off on the phone, the vibration on the table, and it really almost is like automatic and subconscious. It's fascinating to watch, at least. That's my, my non psychology description of it. And I, I'll admit that I was for a while, probably still, I'm a little bit addicted to tick tock. Love tick tock. I actually, I've kind of gravitated, for a variety of reasons, over to YouTube shorts, which works exactly the same way. But are those types of things like where we're literally we have complete control over the content that's being delivered to us. I can watch something for five or 10 seconds, and if it's not interesting, I can flip to the next thing. Is that contributing as well? Do you

Gloria Mark: 8:36

think? Oh, absolutely. So let's, let's take the example of Tiktok. Sure, Tiktok has a recommender algorithm, and it learns very quickly what kind of Tiktok videos you like, and then it very quickly sends you other videos that it believes you will like. And so that helps us, helps keep us glued to the platform, and it's really hard to break away when you know that there's a video coming up that's going to be hilarious, right? And so that actually creates a form of conditioning that's randomly reinforced, which means we don't get a hilarious Tiktok every single time, but it comes up randomly, and that's enough to keep us glued to the site. It's like a slot machine in Las Vegas. You know, every single time you pull the lever, you're you're not going to get a reward, but every so often it will happen, and that keeps you glued, keeps you doing it. So that's what helps keep us addicted to these sites. Now, if a person has really good self regulation, and they can be on social media for five minutes max, and be able to pull away, that's okay. The problem is not. Going on that site, the problem is not being able to pull out when we have more important things to do. And if a person feels that there's someone with poor self regulation, and I don't mean you, I just

Matt Kirchner: 10:14

mean anyone, he could mean me, because I think I'm a good example, we continue. But I mean

Gloria Mark: 10:19

there's so many people who who don't have good self regulation and and there's nothing wrong with them, then they have to come up with strategies. So, for example, sometimes if I just have a string of meetings, and I just want to, you know, think of something else before my next meeting, I might pull out a simple game, knowing that in five minutes I have to stop because I've got my next meeting coming up, and that's like a kind of a hook that will pull me out of being Lost in this mindless game. My self regulation isn't so bad, mainly because I study this and I've become, you know, I've seen people having troubles paying attention, so I try to learn these lessons. So again, nothing wrong with social media or mindless games in moderation. Moderation meaning a few minutes, right? But there are so many other things that are much better to help clear our minds, like getting up, moving around, walking outside, and these will cure our distraction, much, much better,

Matt Kirchner: 11:43

some really fascinating insights just in that last answer in response Gloria. And so we need to pull some of that apart. We started with kind of the discussion about how a platform like, you know, like Tiktok, will use AI to basically continue to serve up and get you hooked on the content in and in knowing, you know, even subconsciously or consciously, that whatever it is that you're in, whether it's you know, and I see, you know, I get politic, political videos. You might get videos about preparing food. I get a lot of those. I get a lot of the I get a lot of videos about dogs, for whatever reason. The reason is probably because I like dogs, and I I tend to hang on those, on those tick tocks a little bit longer than others, and and the algorithm knows that, so it gives me more and more of what I what I want. It feels like, and I've got a number of questions that came out of what you just talked about. But for one, it feels like, you know, AI is still, it's really in its infancy, right? We're still in the nascent artificial intelligence guy, you know, God only knows what's coming. It kind of sent, I kind of sense that this problem, if we call it, a problem of short attention spans, is probably on its way to getting worse, not better. Is that fair to say?

Gloria Mark: 12:47

It very well could be and without actually doing measurements, we don't know where it's heading, although I will say that we seem to have reached a steady state for a period of about five, six years of this average of about 47 seconds. And the AI was still going on at the time, there was still there were algorithms sure which are very, very sophisticated that can help, that can profile us and send us material that the algorithm believes that we would be interested in. So it's hard to say in response, if our attention spans will get worse, right? Maybe we're already at the lowest point that they can be. So we just need to continue measuring it

Matt Kirchner: 13:37

and continuing measuring it in this 47 second number, if I recall, from the book and I and we'll make sure and link, you know, connections to the book in Amazon and so on, in the in the show notes, so our reader, or so our readers, our audience, can get their hands on it, because it really is worth reading. One of the things that I thought was interesting is, yeah, the average is 47 seconds. But if we think about some of our Mean, Median mode learning that we did when I was paying attention in high school, which wasn't all the time, or maybe being college, the the median is even less, right, isn't it? Like 40 seconds? So like, you know, while the average is 47 half of us have a have an attention span. I get, I guarantee you, I'm in the in the half that's in the less than four, somewhere less than 40 seconds or 40 seconds and less. And in fact, I I've used that as an example, and I have to, thank you. By the way, I do a ton of keynoting and speaking as our audience knows a wide variety of topics, but many of them related to stem and TechEd and artificial intelligence. And I'll go into a presentation or a speech for a 45 minute speech with 120 slides, and every single time the organizer who's loading those slides up in the computer is like, you know, they get worried, right? They're like, you realize you only have 45 minutes, right? And my answer is always yes. But now I've got, you know, research that proves that my audience attention span, at least half of them, is going to be 40 seconds or less. I better go through every single one of those slides and have something changing every 30 or 40 seconds to make sure that I hang out of the audience. So I, I think. Thank you for that research. And I want to talk now you talk about the you know, No, there isn't something wrong with you if you have a shorter attention span. Yes, we all know everybody's attention span is getting shorter that there are some tools. The first thing, I think, in a message for our teachers and for our students is, look, don't feel guilty. And don't make a student feel guilty because of the short attention span. There are some benefits. We'll talk about that, but also some strategies you talk about, you know, maybe doing some getting involved, whether it's social media or a mindless game that you're playing. And I do both, you know, five minutes before a meeting, so you have an automatic cut off. My biggest challenge, if I'm on social media, is getting on. I'm usually go to bed pretty early, getting on 1520, minutes before bed, and then all of a sudden, I'm, you know, sudden, I'm, you know, a half hour past my bedtime, because a half hour went away because I kept seeing this content that I wanted to see. What are there other strategies that we should be thinking about in terms of making sure that we're we're limiting or being disciplined about our attention spans?

Gloria Mark: 15:57

Yeah. So first of all, you've mentioned you're on social media 15 minutes before you go to bed, not always, but often not all right? Well, many people are like you. The blue light when we're on our devices can interfere with sleep, and so it's really important to go off a screen one to two hours before bedtime. So one of the reasons why people, children, adults, have trouble paying attention is because their cognitive resources are depleted. So everybody has a limited amount of cognitive resources, and you can think of that as attentional capacity. And if you have a really good night's sleep, you start your day with a full tank of attentional capacity. Now, if you're not getting good sleep, right, if the blue light is interfering with sleep, or I know many people, and I've been an educator for many, many years, and I know that students tend to go to sleep late and then they're they have to get up early to go to classes. Not getting enough sleep makes it really hard to pay attention our cognitive resources. We're starting off the day at a disadvantage, with less resources than we need to get through the day. So probably one of the most important things is to get a good night's sleep.

Matt Kirchner: 17:32

Just occurs to me, as you're saying, that Gloria, it almost becomes a flywheel effect, right? Is that what I'm hearing that if I don't get good sleep, I don't have a great attention span, and if my attention span is waning, I may be doing things that prevent me from getting good sleep. And it just, you know, you just create this flywheel effect. Was, is kind of a, you know, it just an interesting observation. The other thing I'll mention on the sleep front, really quickly, I'm a strong non believer in coincidence, that when you know coincidences happen and there's something trying to tell me something, I'm reading a book right now called out live by Dr Peter Attia that's been a pretty, pretty widely read book on on how we increase our health span over time. And he points to four things that are important for creating for increasing health span, one of which is sleep. And his argument is that that has been really an underappreciated side of both our physical and mental health for years.

Gloria Mark: 18:19

I'm really glad you brought that up. We did research on what's called sleep debt, and we did this with college students. So sleep debt refers to the idea that our we get less sleep over a period of time. So if a person needs eight hours of sleep each night, and they're only getting six hours, then they're accumulating debt, sleep debt. And then, if you have you know, ideally, when you're in debt for two hours, you should make up that time and sleep longer. But that's not typically what happens. What what happens with students, and what we measure in our studies is that the sleep debt accumulates over the period of the week. And so if you're consistently two hours less of sleep than what you need, you're ending your week with a lot of sleep debt. And what do people typically do? They try to sleep on weekends to make up for it, and it just upsets our sleep balance, and what we find is a very strong relationship between the amount of sleep debt and the inability to pay attention the next day. And what happens as sleep debt rises the ability to pay attention gets worse over the stories of the week. And it's not just the length

Matt Kirchner: 19:45

of sleep true if I if I'm correct, right, it's also the quality of that sleep. To your point earlier about blue light and how much REM sleep we're getting, and how much deep sleep we're getting versus how much light sleep we're getting, which is something I've been actually studying in myself for the last six months, and found fascinating. And you start to make kind. Actions to activities, especially the last four or five, six hours of the day, and the sleep score I get from the the smart watch that I wear. And it's just absolutely fascinating. So it's quality and quantity both. Am I right about that?

Gloria Mark: 20:12

That's That's right, and I love what you brought out about not believing in coincidences, and I also don't believe in coincidences and stress can also affect our our sleep, but stress can also affect our attention. So there's there's a lot that's packed into this idea of not getting enough sleep, our cognitive resources not being at their optimal amount stress really plays a strong role, and so people need to learn to take care of their stress, because we also see in our studies a relationship between higher stress and worse ability to pay attention.

Matt Kirchner: 21:00

Well, there's so much research around that especially one of the things I'm particularly fascinated in is how we kind of raise the floor. We say it for K 12 students who may not have the same kind of opportunities that I did and going through my education pathway. I mean, there's whole communities of students, regrettably, that really have challenges outside of the classroom that they bring to the classroom, one of which is any trauma or stress that's happening outside they bring to the classroom is just one way of influencing attention span. What are the other things that are going on in the classroom around attention span, whether it's something that's happening in a student's life outside the hours of school or something that takes place in the education journey while the student is actually at school.

Gloria Mark: 21:39

Let me first of all talk about the audios thing, and that's smartphones. So I did a study with a researcher. We Shin Lee, who's a professor in South Korea, and what we did was we tracked students use of smartphones throughout the day, and we use sensors so we could see exactly when they were using their smartphones. We could look at their locations. I mean, we we got quite a bit of information about the students, and we found that for those students who use smartphones in the classroom, they spent about 30% of the time on their phones. Wow. And it's not just a long break, but it's a lot of smaller interruptions, and so they're not getting they're not hearing the lecture, they're not paying attention to the lecture. And when I talked about the automatic attention, a lot of that practice is just purely automatic picking up the phone. You might be the slightest bit bored, so you reach for the phone and pick it up. We also find this correlation between those students who use the smartphones most in the classroom and also who spent the most time on smartphones throughout the day, with lower grades. So it really has an impact. So that's, that's one of the main things, you know, of course, from having taught for many years, I know that I also have to put in some work to make the lecture interesting, sure. And I find that making it interactive, you know, really bringing students into the discussion and making the material relate to their own lives, like making it current. And you know, something that they understand right, that it's not abstract, but trying to bring theory into something that people can relate to, especially on a personal level, that helps with attention.

Matt Kirchner: 23:48

Yeah, it really puts a whole different set of pressures on educators in this day and age, in terms of, you know, how they present content. I spend a lot of time thinking and speaking about this particular topic, because I'm a believer that in a lot of ways, we're going to disrupt the historical way of delivering education. And, you know, we've got a model for education now that has been, you know, really predicated on, you could argue it goes back 400 years, or maybe even 4000 years, one person with a tremendous amount of wisdom and knowledge imparting that wisdom and knowledge to a group of students through a lecture or presentation or or mentoring, or what have you. And certainly, you know, in the even 50 years ago, with students that have the ability to go to a, you know, go to a video, go to a smartphone, learn in their mode of learning, whether that was e learning or a video presentation, they can stop and start again, or going into a classroom. I've got, you know, one of one of my children, is just an incredible classroom learner. She can just go in and sit through a lecture and, you know, everything sticks. And I was never, ever like that. I don't know where she got that from, but it certainly, certainly wasn't for me. And then you see other children that, you know were like I was, where it's just impossible to learn in a lecture. I think the beauty of technology, in a lot of ways, is that we're going to have a lot of different ways of delivering learning. Learning. I talk about the idea that in the past, we would go to school to learn and we would go home to practice. So you go to school to listen to your lecture and then you go home to write your, you know, write your papers and do your exams and do your studying and review your notes. And that, you know, in the future, we're going to morph to an age where there's a lot more balance between. We'll go to school, I'm sorry. We'll stay home, in some cases, to learn. I can learn. I can sit through a lecture anywhere, depending on how I learn best, and then I go to school to practice, which really starts to put pressure on educators for how we make that time at whether it's a university classroom or lab, a technical college, a high school, what have you? How do we make that more interactive? How do we challenge the students thinking and so on. All kinds of really cool things happening in the in the world of education, a long way of kind of teeing up the next question that I had for you, Gloria, which is, you know, if I'm a STEM teacher, if I'm a TechEd teacher, if I'm teaching science at the university level, or maybe even other other disciplines, what is all this work that you've done studying our attention span? How does it influence and inform how we should create experiences for students when they're

Gloria Mark: 26:04

at school. So let me start by talking about a trend that I'm seeing, and the trend is that we're seeing change in school curricula to cater to students shorter attention spans. So what, what I've been seeing is that, for example, rather than assigning books, there's seems to be a trend to assign passages to read so short, shorter forms of the material. I have also been looking at trends where lecture materials, and that this is, this is not a bad thing. But instead of, you know, a 50 minute lecture, it's broken down into chunks, okay, so very short chunks of material followed by maybe students doing something interactive, but especially when it comes to assigning passages, as opposed to entire books, what that's doing is reinforcing students short attention spans. It's not getting them to develop a muscle to be able to read long form content to pay attention. Right? When I was in school, we had to read books, totally right? And when, when I was growing up, we we had to read books. But if you look at surveys, you'll see that kids and and teenagers are reading fewer books. It's not surprising, but interesting. It's yeah, and so I think that we need to be thinking about retraining students minds and changing their mindsets so that they can begin to appreciate long form material. If I assign a book, students are groaning, oh my gosh, we have to read a book, yeah, but think of it as a way to retrain the mind, to get the mind used to reflection, deliberation, going into depth, into material

Matt Kirchner: 28:14

that's really, really interesting to me. I, you know, I think about like Huckleberry Finn. I forget how old I was when I read Huckleberry Finn. It was. I mean, it's still remember all the stories, and still remember all the lessons of that book. Yeah, I think the other one was, like, the good earth by Pearl S buck about, you know, about, like, China, you know, years ago. It's just a fascinating and I had a teacher, by the way, in high school who just delivered that learning in a way that stuck with you, right? And it wasn't it some, you know, in some cases, like reading technical material that got a little bit grueling. Reading a history textbook, you know, a little bit more difficult for me, but getting deep into a novel and understanding the characters and reading the story, and the part I, frankly, always struggled with was, what are the lessons I always needed my teacher to help me understand what, what was the story under the story that I wasn't picking up on? You know that you read a book about animal like Animal Farm and, and you think that book is just about a bunch of animals and how they kind of govern themselves, and it's really, you know, in some cases, a greater story about, you know, something like communism or socialism and, and, and just those kind of lessons that we learn from that long form reading that I think you're right. I mean, if you're not if you're not getting deep into the content that way, you're really, you know, a you're not training your mind to be able to concentrate, and that was never my forte, as I've said several times. But you're also not gleaning all that material and getting the huge benefit you can from from reading that kind of content. So if I'm hearing you right, is is it a combination? Do we need to do both? Do we? Do we a need to meet students where they are and recognize that they're going to have to get some smaller and shorter snippets of learning along with some more experiential learning, and we have to get them into the long form understanding the discipline of reading a, you know, a two or 300 page book, and the benefits that is it both, or is it an or

Gloria Mark: 29:58

I am a. More in favor of it being an or but to get to the point where where students can appreciate long form content, we probably have to start to where they are now, sure, but what we should not be reinforcing shorter attention spans. For example, book summaries. There are plenty of companies, and there's just a huge readership for book summaries, which are 15 minutes. And this, this includes science books as well,

Matt Kirchner: 30:33

move way beyond Cliffs Notes from 40 years ago, right? Yeah.

Gloria Mark: 30:37

And, you know, I've talked to so many students who say, Oh yes, I I read the summary of this book. You know the 15 minute summary, right? Yeah, that's only reinforcing students to continue to have short attention spans, and it's not teaching them how they can deliberate over the material, how they can think more deeply. You know, there's this psychological idea that's called depth of processing, and what that refers to is that if you can actively participate in material, which means you're you're not just reading it passively, but you're being active in consuming it. For example, you're taking notes, you're asking questions. You're asking your own questions, not questions that the teacher assigned. You're going to retain that material better, and you're going to be able to take that material and integrate it into your current store of knowledge and expand your own knowledge, right? But we can't do depth of processing if we're getting material in small chunks and in summaries. But students have to really and it will be a struggle if they're used to having short attention spans, right? It's going to be a struggle at first, but it's also about changing a mindset to begin to appreciate longer material. And it could be scientific books absolutely doesn't, yeah, for sure, doesn't have to be fiction

Matt Kirchner: 32:16

well, and yeah, in a lot of cases, meeting the student, where they are, which I think is one of the benefits of, you know, education in the future is that we can find different, you know, everybody's got different modalities of learning and different interests. And if you can combine the two of those in a way that delivers the learning outcomes in a way that's, that's, you know, relatable to the student, you probably have the best opportunity to to have a successful academic journey without without question. As you were talking about this. It really again, coincidence has happened for a reason. I read, and maybe you did, as we record this here in late June, just this week, we had there's an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal written by Alyssa Finley that talks about the waning attention span and also goes deep into active learning, as you just discussed the value of taking notes. I totally find that right, like I my retention is so much better. If I'm physically writing the notes down. I can even remember, like, 20 pages ago, what part of the page on which side of the notebook the you know, the thing was that we talked about, and I could just immediately go right back to it, it, you know, it clicks like that for me. And even the act of typing notes, or, worse yet, just recording a lecture, or worse, even you that having like an AI take the notes for you, there's, there's really not that active learning and that engaged learning, and it feels like what you're saying, at least in a lot of ways, mirrors that editorial or that opinion piece that I read earlier this week. Is that, is that

Gloria Mark: 33:36

right? That's, that's absolutely right. So I did an experiment in my class when chatgpt first came out. And now I've always had students summarize the articles that I was going to lecture on in the next class period. So they had the article assigned. They were to summarize it and write their reflection on it. And so the experiment was, you know, the first thing I did when chatgpt came in, I said, you can't use chatgpt, okay, to summarize. But of course, I was bluffing, because how could I possibly know? So then I thought about it, and I said, Okay, I want you to use chatgpt, but I want you to first do the summaries and reflections yourself, and then I want you to use chat GPT, and then I want you to revise your summary. And then at the end of the academic quarter, I had students evaluate their experience, and here's what they came up with. So first of all, the chat GPT summaries and reflections did not give them insight into the article, and this was a very common theme that that the students wrote about the chat GPT is creating a distance between them and the article and. So there it's, there's an intermediary, and the intermediary is the AI, which is creating a summary, and you're getting the AI perspective of what's in that article. And so it's also not giving students the opportunity to do the depth of processing that's needed to be able to do sense making and to to really understand and retain what's in that article,

Matt Kirchner: 35:30

that whole concept is just, is just so, so interesting to me. There's a bunch of things going through my head I've mentioned so many times on the podcast because it resonated so deeply with me, my friend Todd wanick, the CEO of Ashley furniture industry, suggested I read a book earlier this year called Genesis. It was written by Henry Kissinger and co authored by Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and Craig Muncie, the former VP of strategy for Microsoft. And they go into this whole idea of it becomes a whole discussion about what it means to be human, and as we get AI to do more and more of our kind of day to day, mundane tasks, how are we going to create purpose, and how are we going to, you know, live lives that matter, and this is, you know, this kind of speaks right to that where it's like if we're just going to become automatons that are using AI to analyze information and Tell us what the AI thinks. And AI isn't thinking even it's at this point, it's an algorithm that's just, you know, performing a mathematical function. But the AI thinks we should know, you know, that's one level of living and not a very fulfilling one. And if we're going deeper into the content, if we're letting that content speak to us, if we're not having an AI, for example, that's interpreting what it thinks is important to us and then delivering that to us and to your students experience doesn't even necessarily summarize it in a way that they find meaningful. That really, really tells us something. I think the other thought that I had that was going through my head as you were saying that Gloria is this whole idea of not just getting deeper into the content, but as a teacher, as an educator, as a professor and instructor, I mean, whatever level of education we're talking about, you know, now we have kind of a, you know, an environment that's bucking up against this whole idea of going deeper into the content of the long form education. What? What advice do you have? Obviously, you're finding ways to do it, to make sure that at a minimum. And I guess we can, you know, we can debate whether it's we should be delivering the learning in two different ways, and one that kind of meets the attention span where it is, and the other one that disciplines it to go deeper. Or, to your point, maybe we just need to be spending more focus on on, how do we do more long form learning? And but I think the answer might be the same either way, if I'm a teacher that believes in, you know, continuing at least some version of traditional education, where we have students reading novels and scientific materials and what have you what advice do you have for those folks that are that are trying to maintain that focus, but also recognizing that the world of education might be putting a different pressure on them?

Gloria Mark: 37:59

Yeah, we're, we're in such a I would say we're at a turning point right now where AI is just becoming increasingly more used now. I would say it's fine for AI to be used in technical tasks like software engineering, medical diagnostics. I mean, it can really improve in efficiency. It can optimize, for example, finding disease. But AI is now being used in routine, everyday tasks, and it concerns me that students are relying on AI to do the tasks that they should be doing with their own minds. And what's wrong with using AI. Had talked about it creating a distance between the person the material, but there's this other aspect, and that is that AI creates flawless content. Now, of course, there are hallucinations and errors. You know, we can't dismiss that. There are plenty of hallucinations, but the output that we get is flawless in terms of its grammatical structure, and the output often looks robotic. And when I did that experiment in class, and I had hundreds of examples from the students, they also pointed out to me that the output was very robotic. It didn't seem human, and I just wrote about that in my sub stack this week, about how this can create norms that our students or any individual has to produce output that's perfect, that's flawless, and you do that by using AI, that's that's what people are thinking. Right? And I want us to bring back the idea that making mistakes is so important, right? And that's how students learn. That's how students grow, is when they make mistakes and learn from that. And by having an over reliance on AI, it's not giving students the opportunity to make mistakes and to, you know, be able to to learn from that, to grow from that.

Matt Kirchner: 40:26

Yeah, Perfection is the enemy of progress, is what we say. And you're right that. And I don't think, I mean, first of all, if every student was writing a perfect paper, what did they need to be in school for? Right? I mean, that isn't the goal. The goal is to, you know, to analyze, to make some mistakes, to fall short of the expectation. Understand where you fell short, and then and then augment or improve. I mean, that's in a large part what education is all about. And frankly, if every student is meeting the bar, it's probably an example or a indication that the bar needs to be raised a little bit so that we can continue to improve and continue to strive for something, something greater. Also, didn't know you had a sub stack. You'll have one more follower after this particular episode of The TechEd Podcast.

Gloria Mark: 41:07

Let me add one more thing, yeah, and that's to be able to make mistakes requires courage, and I see a reliance on AI taking away people's courage to make mistakes because the norms we're creating norms of having perfect output, yep, and I would so much rather students have the nerve to make mistakes and to be corrected and to understand what's Behind those mistakes. That goes back again to this idea of depth of processing

Matt Kirchner: 41:45

so that and that gives our educators some really good understanding of of how they might, you know, push back against the system a little bit, and some examples of this importance of of going deeper, of not expecting perfection from students. That shouldn't be the goal of education. The goal should be making mistakes and and learning from them, having the courage to make mistakes and also having the courage to to at least lean back a little bit when, when a teacher or an educator feels as though, for whatever reason, we need to continue to focus on the aspect of education that says it's okay to go deeper, it's good to go deeper. And we shouldn't be using, you know, AI and generative AI to do, the work of the student. It can, it might be, might it might assisted in some might assist the students in some cases, but, but certainly not doing the actual work and letting AI be a substitute for for deep thought and for learning. And that's really what, what in so many ways, academia is all about. It's all about the educators, but it's also all about the students. In fact, even more so about the students. And I know we've got students that listen to this podcast that are saying, Okay, this is all great. I've got a couple ideas of how I can improve my attention span. What three strategies would you suggest Gloria to a student, whether that's a college student, university student, a high school student, what have you, that recognizes they have an issue in terms of maintaining that attention span for longer periods of time. What should they be doing to improve that? Yeah,

Gloria Mark: 43:07

so first of all, going back to the idea of individual differences, everyone has an individual, personal rhythm of their cognitive resource level, right? I use this metaphor of a tank of cognitive resources. Now, there are peaks and valleys throughout the day, and my attentional peak is usually mid morning. I don't start out on top of my game, you know, when I first wake up, but someone else who has what's called an early chronotype, who's up at five and ready to go, their attentional peak might be earlier. Sure, someone who's a late type, they won't have a peak until later in the day. And we find that there, on average, there are two attentional peaks, but they're also valid when we just get depleted. And so it's really important for students to understand what their own personal rhythm of attention is, and to use that to guide them to the extent that they can make decisions. And I'm talking probably more about college level, because they have a little bit more flexibility in their schedules to be able to do those hardest tasks at those points when their attention is at full or high capacity, sure, and to understand, to recognize that when you're drained, it's time to take A break, and that's it comes to my second point is that it's so important to take breaks. We, you know, to if we try to push ourselves through the day with constant focus, we can't do that because being focused is also correlated with being stressed. Just because we we need to summon up the resources we need to be able to focus sure and so take a break. Take breaks regularly, to the extent that you can take breaks once an hour, and to also be able to take an extended break during the day to clear your mind. And you know, exercise is great. I'm, I'm an Exercise fanatic. I every day I do exercise and it just clears my mind. Awesome. And so, so that's, that's the second thing there. There are other strategies too. And one strategy I like very much, it's called using forethought, and it's about imagining your future self as a motivator to stay focused. So if a person is tempted to go on social media, create a visualization of how you see yourself at the end of the day. Where do you want to be, but how do you want to feel? And I want to feel rewarded and fulfilled and positive, and I want to see myself relaxing and being with my family, and I don't want to see myself 10 or 11 o'clock at night working on that deadline, right? And so bringing up that visualization can help keep us on track. And it's also about probing ourselves to understand when when we have these automatic actions, picking up our phone, clicking on social media. That's automatic, right? If you probe yourself, do I need to go to social media right now? Do I need to be on the phone? We become more conscious of our actions, and at those points is when you can use that visualization. It's a powerful tool. It is to help keep us on traffic.

Matt Kirchner: 47:04

We could do a whole episode just on on self visualization and visualizing the future. It is indeed a powerful tool. But the, you know, three really, really good pieces of advice, figure out what your peak time of day is. I could tell you if I, if they if I could have taken classes at five in the morning, that's I'm at my best in the first, you know, three or four hours of the day in terms of attention span, certainly really, really important make sure to take a break. And exercise is a great way to step away from whether it's social media, the screen time, what have you. Then also that whole idea of forethought and visualizing that future you, in some cases, 10 years ahead of time, but in this case, at the end of the day, and recognizing the more attention I can put into something now, the less distraction and the less rushed I'm going to be at the end of the day. Really, really good pieces of advice. We've got probably time for one last question here for Dr Gloria mark and Gloria, that question is this, and as much as we talked about visualizing the future, I want to take a moment to visualize the past and go back all the way to that 16 year old Gloria. You're maybe a sophomore in high school yourself. And if you had the opportunity to give that young individual one piece of advice, what would you tell her? I

Gloria Mark: 48:14

would say, don't be discouraged when things go south. For you, when things go wrong, have faith in yourself that you know it's going to work out. Slow down, you know, keep the faith that you'll be okay. I mean, I can't tell you how stressed I was, and you know, there's so many there are joys, but there are also disappointments. And I would tell myself, you'll be okay, you'll be fine. Just, you know, work out and trust that things, things will be okay. Don't stress. You've got your your whole life for stress, right? Exactly, and we should, should not spend too much time at stress.

Matt Kirchner: 49:02

Yeah. Good advice for our for our current selves as well, but certainly that that 16 year old, don't get discouraged. Everything is going to be okay. Keep the faith, don't stress. Absolutely important, important advice. We've gotten so many great pieces of important advice on this episode of The TechEd Podcast with Dr Gloria Mark, I want to let you know that number one, Gloria, thank you so much for being with us. It's been an absolute pleasure. We're gonna link the show notes up at TechEd podcast.com/mark that is TechEd podcast.com/m a, r, k, so check them out there. Gloria, we'll make sure the book is linked up, and we'll make sure some of the other resources we talked about are there as well when you're done at the TechEd podcast.com, checking out the show notes, be sure and check us out at social media. Just don't do it in the last two hours before you go to bed. We don't want that blue screen time, but check us out on social we are all over. You'll find us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Tiktok, Instagram. Doesn't matter where you consume your social media, you will find. Mind our channels, and we would love to hear from you here at The TechEd Podcast, and love to see you again next week. Thank you so much for being with us. My name is Matt Kirkner, and this is The TechEd Podcast you.