Screens, attention, and mental health

I want my students to learn--of course!--but I mainly want them to be fulfilled and happy people. Writing is a path to those broader goals. I don't want fundamental aspects of my teaching to get in the way. I follow a teacherly version of the Hippocratic Oath. 

Lately, I've been thinking about how such general goals of student wellness might clash with online learning. Of course, as if this nearly 20-year-old blog weren't evidence enough, you should know that I am a firm advocate of the value of online learning, especially online writing (and literacy) instruction; simply, OWI gives students access to learning in ways they otherwise wouldn't. It extends the classroom in writing-rich ways. It's great.

But there are costs with any benefit, and one in particular resonated with me after I recently finished the book Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. This fascinating book looks at "why we seem to have lost our sense of focus, and how we can get it back" (p. 9). Using a mix of research and anecdote, Hari unspools a series of causes; unsurprisingly several of them connect with our life around screens (although he discusses other strong trends and causes too).

Consider that students who sign up for our online courses do not receive an accompanying app that keeps them focused when they are "in" class, particularly asynchronous class. We can't control behaviors such as students distractedly scrolling the web while "in class" nor do we have control over if our class work doesn't push them over daily, weekly, monthly screen time limits.

Should we be looking into this more, and, if so, how? How might we approach conversations about limiting screen time in environments fundamentally mediated by screens? After all, many screens  have inherent characteristics, as Maida Lynn Chen in The Conversation pointed out in discussing insomnia, depression, and screens: "... the light emitted from most handheld devices, even with a night filter, a blue light filter, or both, is enough to decrease levels of melatonin, the primary hormone that signals the onset of sleep."

Intriguing research and pedagogical avenues seem open here for teachers to explore and critique the structure of their very courses.

We want to learn more, as students' education could be intertwined with tools that may have deleterious effects on their attention spans and perhaps their overall mental health. This, I suppose, is akin to ergonomics studies showing the effects of sitting in a chair all day at work or school and seeking solutions.

For this brief post, I did a cursory review of some research. The pandemic opened opportunities to study this area, for instance, the metastudy, "A systematic review of screen-time literature to inform educational policy and practice during COVID-19" in The International Journal of Educational Research Open by Siamack Zahedi, Rhea Jaffer, and Anuj Iyer, which looked at 52 studies but found them "too small," "inconclusive," or "critically underrepresented" and suggested, "These facts, along with the undeniable benefits of online learning in the absence of brick-and-mortar schooling and the ominous forecasts of learning loss caused by prolonged school closure, inform our recommendations for a more moderate policy and practical stance on restrictions...." Another is an Education Next article "Should We Limit 'Screen Time' in School?" by Daniel Scoggin and Tom Vander Ark; here is a link to a forum connected to that article.

Looking briefly at the available literature, I'm thinking about next steps, and, as I type away on the web interface of my computer (on a Saturday), I'm wondering if we need to develop tools--what would that even mean!?--to help our online students stay focused.