Children spent a quarter of their time in class daydreaming, according to a new study by Queen’s University Belfast (QUB).
The study, conducted by the School of Psychology, involved 97 children between the ages of six and eleven.
The results suggest that while daydreaming is unavoidable, it can interfere with learning.
The results have just been published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.
Studies on the connections between daydreams or “mind wandering” and learning in children were carried out by Prof. Teresa McCormack, Dr. Agnieszka Graham and Jessica Cherry from QUB.
dr Graham said that knowing more about daydreaming in children could help identify ways to reduce it in school.
The QUB study is the first of its kind to examine how daydreaming affects how well children learn and remember what they were taught.
Daydreaming or mind wandering is common in both children and adults, but most of the research done to date has focused on how it affects adults or teenagers.
In previous studies involving adults, higher rates of daydreaming were “associated with poorer performance on a range of learning activities, including reading,” according to the QUB paper.
In QUB research on daydreaming in younger children, 97 children between the ages of six and eleven listened online to a recorded story about a fictional pharaoh in ancient Egypt.
About every two minutes they were asked a question to check if they were paying attention or if their mind had wandered elsewhere.
During the exercise, the children reported “mind wandering” about a quarter of the time (25%).
After the story ended, the children were then asked 10 questions to see what they could remember, if they liked the story and how interested they were in it.
Whether they were interested or not affected how often they daydreamed, and those who daydreamed more often remembered the story less.
This suggests that children who are very interested in a lesson at school will daydream less.
The QUB team said the results indicated that daydreaming “can be reliably measured in children and is of educational importance.”
“Mind wandering is detrimental in educationally meaningful activities,” states the QUB newspaper.
“In an educational context, if students do not attend class because of (daydreaming), it may affect their chances of acquiring important skills or knowledge.
“Children’s interest in the subject affected the level of mind wandering, which in turn affected participants’ ability to recall facts from the story.”
In a separate statement, Dr. Agnieszka Graham proposes that finding out more about when and why children daydream at school could help teachers find ways to reduce them in the classroom.
“Children often get into trouble at school when their minds wander. It’s sometimes taken as a sign of disrespect or wrongdoing if they’re not paying attention,” she said.
“However, our research has shown that children, like adults, are unable to concentrate fully all of the time and are likely to have their minds wandering for a significant portion of a typical school day.
“Our results suggest that further research into the causes and consequences of mind wandering during these early school years could provide a solid basis for developing interventions that help children recognize when their minds are wandering from the task at hand, and their to refocus attention.”
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