Students' attention during a lecture - Strategies to expand the attention span

Abstract

This report is intended to highlight some of the key challenges related to lectures in higher education, in particular maintaining a long attention span. In general, students lose interest quickly while attending the lecture. We here address some of the methods that we believe can help overcome this challenge and make lectures more interesting for students. In particular, we discuss the body of lecture, interactive lectures, the use of technology and changes in the environment as some of the important aspects. Next, we provide our assessment about the literature review and relate it to the SOLO taxonomy and the deeper learning approach. Finally, we conclude that all different methods discussed in the report have the potential to implicitly help the students be attentive throughout the lectures, but they are not ideal solutions applicable to all contexts.