How Students Can Combat Shrinking Attention Spans

The app Brainscape provides study tools so it’s only natural they would investigate changing attention spans. General attention spans have been declining rapidly, but the team at Brainscape have found that students that use their app are having longer study sessions than ever, implying that their attention spans are actually improving.

To discover how students who use their app are defying the general trends, the Brainscape team delved deeper into the statistics and tried to determine which techniques are helping these students improve. Brainscape designed their tools to work with the brain’s natural processes to make studying and paying attention easier to do. Here are the techniques they use in their tools:

• Spaced Repetition — Repeat exposure to concepts broken down into parts.
• Active Recall — Retrieving information from memory.
• Metacognition — Self-reflection on understanding of a concept.
• Accessibility of study tools — Convenient time and access to tools improves study habits.
• Visible progress — Encourage learning with clear progress.