Does checking for attention help students learn?

Spoiler: yes. Yes it does.

“Checking for listening” has become one of those oddly contested classroom routines. On the face of it, it’s neither mysterious nor especially grand: the teacher explains something, then punctuates that explanation with quick, simple questions designed to establish whether students are attending to what has just been said. These aren’t checks for deep understanding, nor are they intended to be. Their purpose is to attempt explanations from disappearing into the void, and to make students accountable for their attention visible. Pritesh Raichura recommends this kind of questioning as a way of securing 100 per cent participation and building a culture in which students visibly show they are with the teacher.

My preference is to use the term ‘checking for attention’ as this is obviously broader than just listening. You can read about how I do it here. Although the terms seem broadly synonymous I’m going to be referring to checking for attention (CfA) for the rest of the article.

In a recent article, Christian Moore-Anderson objects that this practice rests on a mistaken view of cognition which treats students as passive recipients of information rather than active makers of meaning. He argues that understanding requires interpretation, inference, and selection and I agree that no serious account of teaching should reduce students to passive storage devices.

In fact there’s a lot to agree with. He’s right to warn against confusing attention with understanding. He’s right that learning depends on “mental action.” He’s right too that students don’t learn merely by having information directed at them. His preferred alternative is to punctuate explanation with prompts for inference, prediction and choice so that attention is secured through purposeful thought rather than through repetition or recall of what’s just been said.

All of that is fair enough as far as it goes. The problem is that it doesn’t go far enough. It mistakes a necessary condition for a sufficient one and then sets up a strawman position in which teachers only check for attention and are, apparently, uninterested in inference, prediction or choice.

The first difficulty is that he attacks a caricature. To say that information is encoded, stored, and retrieved is not necessarily to claim that the brain literally works like a desktop computer, nor that knowledge literally “flows” in the way water flows through a pipe. These are explanatory metaphors for describing aspects of cognition at a useful level of abstraction. Their value lies not in biological realism but in whether they help teachers think clearly about problems like forgetting, overload, attention, and practice. To object that there is “no literal flow” is silly. Of course there’s not. The critique should rest on whether the metaphor captures something educationally useful.

The problem is, we think in metaphors. All understanding is analogical. To suggest that cognition is better understood as action, prediction, and inference is too abstract to be useful. Underlying this is an unstated metaphor of the mind as an active system for action. The mind is reconceived as a problem-solving organism trying to make sense of the world.

I think there’s an assumption that dynamic metaphors are better than static ones, that action is more fundamental than reception, and that prediction, inference, and choice best describe what students are doing. It also assumes that because cognition evolved for action, teaching should be organised around action. But listening, remembering, repeating, and attending are also part of cognition. The deeper problem is that this is still a metaphor, one that may overvalue agency and novelty while undervaluing memory, habit, and the practical realities of teaching.

This might explain the curious overreach in the phrase “biologically unnatural”. Even if human cognition evolved for action in rich environments, it hardly follows that listening to explanation is somehow alien to our nature. We are cultural creatures. We learn through speech, imitation, narration, and shared attention. If it wasn’t possible to learn through listening much of human culture would be redundant. Anderson unfairly dismisses listening as “boring”. Of course, listening to something dull is boring. And listening to something interesting explaining in a dull way might be boring. But what about listening to something fascinating explained with warmth, wit and insight?

Education apprentices students into forms of sustained attention that may not come naturally but are no less valuable for that. Yes, teachers should avoiding subjecting students to tedious droning but they should equally avoid doing everything badly.

The “Just Tell Them” Trap

Listening to a story being read aloud, following a demonstration, or attending to an explanation may not be acting in the robust sense Anderson prefers, but it’s odd to treat such acts as “unnatural.”

As far as I can make out, Moore-Anderson is conflating two separate claims. One claim is descriptive: the brain is not best understood as a passive receptacle. Fair enough. The second is pedagogical: therefore, asking students to repeat or recall what has just been said is “socially irritating,” cognitively unnatural, and inferior to asking them to make choices or predictions. That second claim is a lot less secure. Repetition isn’t necessarily passive, nor is recall inherently opposed to action. To repeat an answer, retrieve a definition, complete a quotation, or reformulate a peer’s contribution is to act. These may be low-threshold forms of action, but action nonetheless. In classrooms, low-threshold mental action is often exactly what’s needed to keep everyone in the room with the teacher.

My view is that no one thinks teaching should only consist of checking for attnetion, or listening. Everyone who subscribes to the idea that attention should be sampled sees it as a means to an end. That is broadly similar to one I think Anderson would accept.

In Attention, Meaning & Mastery I argue that teachers need to answer four questions in every lesson: how do I know that all students are paying attention; how do I know that all students have made sense of what has been taught; how do I know all students are mastering the skills I want them to learn; and how can I do all this in a way that is inclusive and results in all students experiencing success? In this view, checking for attention is necessary but insufficient.

Students can appear to be listening while their minds are elsewhere. They can face the teacher, track with their eyes, even perform the outward signs of compliance, and yet fail to register the substance of what’s been said. To lose focus is human. We are all subject to lapses in attention and my working hypothesis is that all students will lose focus at some point in every lesson. If I don’t know this has happened then I’m unable to do anything about it. The point of checking for attention is not - primarily - to change anything in the students (although I think it does that too) but to collect feedback on my teaching so that I can make better decisions about what to do next.

In my own teaching, I’ve developed the habit of asking students to repeat what I, or their classmates, have just said. Asking a student to repeat what has just been said is a simple, non-confrontational way of refocusing attention. It deals equally well with genuine inattention, anxiety-induced blankness, and the low-level refusal to participate that often accompanies classroom drift. It’s also inclusive. Instead of punishing a student for not knowing, it gives them a route back into the lesson. In asking, “What’s a subordinate clause?” moments after defining it, isn’t to endorse a crude transmission model of learning. It is to establish whether my explanation has landed sufficiently for further thought to occur. This feels pedagogically prudent.

Even the most basic form of checking for attention - asking students to repeat what’s been said - changes cognition. The production effect suggests that saying something aloud can make it more memorable than reading or hearing it silently, perhaps because speech renders the material more distinctive in memory.¹ In this way, speech is “cognitively sticky”. But this is just the start. When we ask students to rephrase what’s just been said and introduce them to new language tools to connect the concepts they’re learning about, speech acts as a powerful lever for cognitive change.

Cognitive levers: using syntax to shape thought

The notion that checking for attention is somehow opposed to richer forms of thought feels a little eccentric. Being able to repeat what’s just been said, to reassemble what’s been previously taught is small step towards the meaning making that we all value.

Moore-Anderson seems to view checking for attention as belonging to a crude transmission model of teaching in which knowledge is poured from one mind into another. Because he rejects that model, he concludes that the routine itself is suspect. But this sets up a false choice. To say that students must attend isn’t to say that explanation alone is enough. To say that students must be able to repeat or recognise what has just been taught isn’t to say that repetition is the end point of learning. It’s simply to acknowledge the fact that if students have not attended to the explanation, they are in no position to infer, predict or choose anything useful about it.

Students cannot make inferences, predictions, or choices about an explanation they haven’t followed. Anderson’s preferred alternative depends on the very attentional conditions he treats as suspect. Before a student can answer, “What if this weren’t true?” they must first have attended to what “this” is. Inference is only made possible by attention.

Teachers don’t stand in front of a class wondering whether cognition is fundamentally enactive or computational. We’re confronted with a room full of children in which some are attentive, some pretending, some drifting, some lost, some trying hard but failing to track. Our problem is practical and immediate: how do we know whether every students is with me right now? If we can’t answer that question, everything else is build on sand.

We should definitely resist a reductive view of the mind, but this does not invalidate the classroom need to check whether students are actually listening. Students need to act with information, but to do so they must first register what’s been said. Of course we shouldn’t mistake compliance for understanding, but neither should we assume meaning making is possible without attention.

1. See MacLeod et al. (2010) on the production effect as a distinct memory phenomenon; MacLeod (2011) for evidence that producing material aloud enhances later recall; and Forrin and MacLeod (2018) for the added finding that hearing one’s own voice may contribute to this memory benefit.