If you’re an educator, you’ve probably wondered how many of your students are paying attention as you deliver course content in class. Although most research on mind wandering has been conducted in the laboratory, understanding when and why students mind wander during class can have important implications for how we teach and design our learning environments.

What kinds of students report more mind wandering during class, and do these students learn or enjoy the course less? Michael Kane, Akira Miyake, and their colleagues (Kane and Miyake pictured below) aimed to answer this question in their article published in the Psychonomic Society journal Memory & Cognition.

Kane and his colleagues recruited over 800 undergraduate students from 10 Psychology courses at two universities to participate in a 3-phase study:

Phase 1: At the beginning of the semester, students completed a series of questionnaires intended to assess their academic traits and habits. These questionnaires asked students about their multi-tasking beliefs and behavior, note-taking skill, test anxiety, course interest, achievement goals, and general susceptibility to mind-wandering and boredom.

Phase 2: During two class sessions, students reported on their thought content at random times throughout the session (e.g., minutes 9, 13, and 27). An experimenter would ring a bell, and students checked the box that best reflected what they were just thinking about in the instant before the bell. Students chose from the following set of options:

The last three options, internal thoughts/images, external events/people/devices, were considered “task-unrelated thoughts” or instances of mind wandering. Students also indicated where in the classroom they chose to sit – in the front third, middle third, or back third of the classroom.

Phase 3: At the end of the semester, students reported on their situational interest – how interesting they found the class and instructor, how useful they found the course, and how valuable they found the course discipline. In addition, instructors provided grades for students in their courses.

This rich dataset allowed the researchers to answer multiple questions about individual differences in student mind wandering and its consequences for learning.

How often do students mind wander during class?

Across the classroom visits, students reported mind wandering about a quarter of the time, but there was a large degree of variability in these reports. However, these reports were reliable across class meetings, suggesting a consistent proclivity to experience (or at least report) mind wandering during class.

Chosen seating location was also related to mind wandering: Students who sat in the back third of the class were about 75% more likely to report mind wandering compared to those who sat in the front third of the class. 

What predicts students’ tendency to report mind wandering during class?

Students who stay off their phones and find ways to stay interested in the class are probably the ones who are staying on task. That is, a higher propensity for classroom media multi-tasking (i.e., how often students texted, emailed, or surfed the web during class) and a greater susceptibility for mind wandering and boredom were positively related to reports of mind wandering. In contrast, greater interest and value in the course topic was negatively related to mind-wandering reports. 

Do reports of mind wandering predict course outcomes?

Yes, but only modestly – higher reports of mind wandering were related to lower course grades and lower situational interest. These results were found even when additional academic traits and habits were included in the models (see image above).

In addition, some academic traits and behaviors predicted course outcomes in part because they predicted mind wandering during class. Mind wandering mediated the relationship between final course grade and both (1) classroom media-multitasking and (2) susceptibility to mind-wandering and boredom. Similarly, mind wandering mediated the relationship between post-course situational interest and (1) classroom media multi-tasking, (2) susceptibility to mind wandering and boredom, and (3) topic interest and value.

Pay attention to this!

Kane and colleagues’ large-scale classroom study provides insight into who is mind wandering and its consequences for learning. The authors also offer great avenues for future research. For example, are some task-unrelated thoughts more harmful to learning than others? And, do different classroom topics or environments contribute to different rates of mind wandering?

According to Kane,

Beyond the actual findings of the study, which I think are interesting and potentially helpful to the field if they replicate in other contexts, I think our research team was excited to see that we could measure reliable individual differences in rates of task-unrelated thought – along with their contextual and trait correlates – in the messy context of multiple classrooms, taught by multiple instructors, at two universities. I hope that our methodological approach, despite its limitations, will inspire similar work from other investigators in other educational contexts. The more we can learn about distraction in the classroom the better we can eventually design our teaching strategies and educational spaces to maximize engagement and learning.

Featured Psychonomic Society article:

Kane, M. J., Carruth, N. P., Lurquin, J. H., Silvia, P. J., Smeekens, B. A., von Bastian, C. C., & Miyake, A. (2021). Individual differences in task-unrelated thought in university classrooms. Memory & Cognition. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-021-01156-3