Alex Escorcio | Contributing Writer
Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, picture for a moment, if you will: The battle with your eyelids enters its second hour as you finish shading the elephantesque ears on the caricature of whomsoever is sitting in front of you; the professor’s mouth is moving and you’re sure there should be another sound accompanying that motion, but the sugar in your cerebrum has sunk to such sparse reserves that any noise
which might have made words instead manifests as a drone akin to a neighbour’s movie-night. You go to check your watch, realize that you’re not wearing one, and check your phone instead. It seems it’s been 4:14 for 15 minutes, and there’s more than an hour to go.
This article is an inquiry into the value of lectures that are over an hour in duration. I have trawled through stacks of scholarly studies in
order to gain the assuredness to submit that the length of lectures in this university is detrimental to student learning.The sustained attention span of an adult is quantified, on average, as being around twenty minutes in duration. Other studies have stretched this figure to as much as fourty minutes.
So, what is a sustained attention span? It is the amount of time for which a person can focus effectively on a task.
A study carried out in 1976 found that students require a few minutes to settle in to a teaching environment, (to take their seats, exchange any restless gossip, sharpen a pencil, smile at that person who they’d rather be sitting beside, and open a book) after which an optimum period of alertness and concentration is maintained for ten to eighteen minutes. Following this period, their efficiency would decline. Another study conducted in 1985 tested students’ propensities to recall facts contained in a 20 minute presentation. Perhaps counter-intuitively, students were more likely to remember facts given at the beginning of
the presentation, than those covered at the end. Information presented after the 15 minute mark was much less likely to stick.
Would the logical conclusion from this data not suggest that classes should be timetabled for just under twenty minutes of premium learning per session? It seems that educational psychologists would advise it. If not, they would be likely to propose that teachers sufficiently alter their approach, style or topic after each twenty minute set in order to attain a similar result. The latter is doubtlessly more difficult to regulate.
Why then does this learning institution, which surely values the amount of information students retain and which surely has access to such studies, not concede that occasionally altering their timetable would do wonders for what should be their principal goal: education?
Can the university argue that such a change would be inconvenient to professors? I would hazard a guess that professors wouldn’t mind more concentration in the room.
Can the college argue that such a change would be too difficult to implement? Well, that would be relatively obtuse – a multitude of universities in the world have picked up on and acted on this information. More hours are not required, only a smarter arrangement of existing ones. That is to say classes of one topic during more than
one hour should be removed from the timetable.
This is the age of the internet, an emperor with a crown of tabs and a cape of so many changing and diverse materials that his subjects have adapted to marvel at tidbits for only moments at a time. Recent studies are showing that our online lifestyles may well be further running down our sustained attention spans. But don’t take it from me. In your own opinion, does the questionability of the idea that is the four hour lecture not precede itself? Have you ever watched a four hour film? Not even media giants would presume to hold your attention for so long. They would if they could.
For those who experience only the greener grass of shorter sessions, the data only serves to affirm the obvious: two, three or more hour lectures are unproductively long.
It is unclear why any learning establishment would subscribe to this less meticulously informed, comparatively detrimental decision. Should they not change so as these lectures are not impinging on our learning abilities, but actually helping it?
For now, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we can only fight our eyelids, check the time, and carry on with the caricature.
