Teaching Johnny to Pay Attention!
Carmen and Geoffrey McGuinness

The ability to pay attention is critical to learning. Children learn what they notice, and learn best what they attend to long enough to make judgements about. Children are by nature curious and eager to discover and to please their adult mentors. However, many children cannot focus and maintain attention well enough and long enough to be successful learners. These children have not mastered control over what they attend to and for how long they can maintain that attention. For many a creaking floorboard across the room is enough to divert them from their task. For others sounds are part of a daily din that is hardly noticed. Likewise, visual stimuli might distract or be missed entirely. In short, children with attention problems are not tuned-in to the signals that tell their peers to stop, look, and listen, or to ignore and carry on with the task at hand. Like all children, children with attention problems have a broad range of personality differences. Some may bump headlong into peers, hurting body and feelings along the way. Others might avoid interaction of any sort, as it requires attention and care. While others might sit quietly ignored, lacking even the attention to notice that they are going unnoticed. Regardless of how their challenges manifest, all of these children are at risk of learning difficulties, sinking further and further behind their attentive peers. Research shows us that they are also at risk of decreased self-esteem, social problems, family difficulties, and potential long-term psychological effects.

Many parents of children with attention problems resort to medication, feeling they have no alternative. Others seek psychological, occupational, vision, diet, or educational therapies to address underlying causes. Clearly no two children are alike in every way, and different remedies work well for different children. For all children with attention problems, a good course of treatment will include an intervention that has been shown to improve the child’s ability to pay attention. One
such intervention by that very name was first used on children and adults who had suffered traumatic brain injury, and has since 1999 (Kerns, et al) provided tremendous results with children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder. Pay Attention! uses a repetitive format with a hierarchical distribution of tasks, across the various types of attention. Let’s look at what attention is and how Pay Attention! trains it.

Focused attention is the ability to select and focus on specific stimuli. It is the first attentional choice the child has as he begins any learning process.

Sustained attention is the ability to maintain attention during repeated trials and over time. It requires what a classroom teacher might term persistence. Much of the grade hinges upon sustained attention, required of seatwork and homework alike.

Selective attention refers to the ability to focus on target stimuli and mask, or inhibit, non-target stimuli. Even the best run classroom will test the student’s ability in this area, and this type of attention is often pivotal in the teacher’s perception of the student’s relative behavior.

By the time the student reaches late elementary school he will be required to demonstrate alternating attention, stopping one task and beginning another, or switching attention between tasks. Arithmetic and mathematics require good alternating attention, such as when the student is multiplying numbers that require that the subtotals be carried, an addition task.

Divided attention is the ability to attend to two or more things at one time. Taking notes during a lecture, or reading and contemplating the material one is reading, are examples of when this sort of attention is needed. Likewise, mathematics word-problems require divided attention.

Parents and other adult mentors, such as coaches, dance teachers, and babysitters, need little prompting to think of dozens of examples of when these types of attention are needed outside the classroom. And indeed by the time the student is ready for employment, the demand mounts.

Pay Attention! employs a repetitive format for increasing each type of attention in turn, using familiar, child friendly visual and auditory material, building from simple to difficult, with a focus on incremental improvement in both quantitative tests and qualitative improvement in real life, the classroom, home, and the playground.

In the research cited above students age four to eleven made an average improvement of 20% in sustained and selective attention, and 35% in overall attentional capacity. On a math efficacy control students made an average gain of 30%. In another study (Chenault, et al, 2004) researchers found that 11-14 year old dyslexic children with prior training in the Pay Attention! program demonstrated significantly higher gains in verbal fluency and composition following Pay Attention! intervention than did the control group.

Pay Attention! works because it is based on the nature of attention, training the five types of attention in keeping with the hierarchical and systematic nature of how children learn, with a focus on the repetition that empirical and case studies have shown to be an imperative component to treatment of children with attentional problems.

Carmen and Geoffrey McGuinness are the founders of Read America, based in Orlando since 1993. The McGuinnesses are the developers of Phono-Graphix® and Language WiseTM, and authors of three books. Twenty-three year veteran advocates of cognitive therapies for the educational challenges of children with special needs, the McGuinnesses have recently opened the Praxis Education Center in Longwood, Florida.