The decline in students’ ability to focus on schoolwork has been a recent topic of concern. Research shows that the average attention span on any screen decreased in youths from 2004, when it was two and a half minutes, to the most recent average of 47 seconds. This difference can be attributed to the rampant and exorbitant amount of short-form media and digital distractions presented to children.
The impact of these distractions is affecting teens to the degree that one student described how TikTok ruined their attention span so badly that they “can’t even watch a one-minute video.” Professor Gemma Calvert at Nanyang Business School, NTU Singapore, engaged in an international study that links social media use to behavioral changes in youths and their parents. Many of the participants reported addictive-like behavior contributing to social media use. It was found that 68 percent of participants also reported difficulty focusing on schoolwork for even more than a minute.
It is evident that the increase in short-form media, such as TikTok and other social media, has taken entertainment to an extreme and frightening new level. The entertainment has inhibited student’s ability to focus long enough to form meaningful connections and to even learn. The result is a generation that has been surrounded by constant distractions, which makes learning more difficult than ever.
It is because of this increasing lack of focus that the use of AI in schools has become so relied upon. Students now have the ability to bypass the most energy intensive part of any assignment which is the action of processing information and brain activation with the material at hand. AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Gemini among others provide an output that satisfies the student and results in a completion grade. There is no learning that actually goes into this process because, as Dany Levy argues in The Harvard Gazette, “No learning occurs unless the brain is actively engaged in making meaning and sense of what you’re trying to learn.” The learning process has been stunted when we are incapable of focusing on the task at hand. That is when we become reliant on the outputs given by AI.
I fear that schools such as ours would implement new guidelines that allow AI as an acceptable resource rather than tackling the problem which is our overwhelming incapability to focus long enough to come away with something valuable each day. While I don’t believe our school system is directly at fault for this issue, I don’t want to see our school acting as a catalyst to this problem in the name of progression and technical advancement.
