Teachers sense when students are bored in the classroom. Eyes glaze over, their minds drift off, and a pall descends upon the class. The tendency is to drone on, repeating your points, perhaps even answering your own questions. A phrase, vividly recalled from childhood, is etched on their faces: “I’m bored!”
Seeing that happening before my very eyes, during a Grade 10 History Exam Review period, in late May 2009, I resorted to extraordinary measures. Spotting the term “Jean Chretien Liberalism” on the review sheet, I walked up to an unsuspecting Grade 10 boy, asked him to stand, and administered “the Shawinigan Handshake.” It certainly grabbed the classes’ attention, and, thankfully, the startled boy was a good sport — and didn’t report it to his parents.
That’s definitely an unorthodox antidote to boredom in the classroom, but it speaks to a much larger issue. Although boredom has been viewed as a rather trivial and short-lived discomfort relived by a change in circumstances, it can be pervasive in high schools, where one period follows another, featuring mostly didactic instruction.
Today’s students are also finding it increasingly intolerable because virtually everything outside of the classroom is on speed dial and “teacher talk” seems to be in slow motion. It’s also clear that engaging student minds is getting harder and that boredom is becoming an unfortunate and pervasive stressor that can have significant consequences for future health and well being.
Although it’s clear that boredom can be a serious problem, the scientific study of boredom remains an obscure field, and boredom itself is still poorly understood. Even though it’s a common experience, boredom hasn’t been clearly defined within the scientific community.
Psychological scientist John Eastwood of York University and colleagues at two other universities, Waterloo and Guelph, are emerging as leaders in the new field. The September 2012 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science featured their latest study. It was designed to understand the mental processes that underlie our feelings of boredom in order to create a precise definition of boredom and to begin looking at how teachers and instructors might respond with new strategies designed to ease the silent pain endured by boredom sufferers of all ages.
Drawing from research across many areas of psychological science and neuroscience, Eastwood and the Canadian research team defined boredom as “an aversive state of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity,” which arises from failures in one of the brain’s attention networks.
Specifically, students become bored when they:
- have difficulty paying attention to the internal information (e.g., thoughts or feelings) or external information (e.g., environmental stimuli) required for participating in satisfying activity
- become aware of the fact that they’re having difficulty paying attention
- believe that the environment is responsible for their aversive state (e.g., “this task is boring,” “there is nothing to do”).
Eastwood and his researchers are confident that integrating the disparate fields of cognitive neuroscience, social psychology, and clinical psychology will produce a more thorough understanding of boredom and attention.
My History class was often a social laboratory for measures designed to interrupt the boredom. Surveying Dr. Eastwood’s experiments in inducing boredom had me laughing at similar boring activities. Taking daily attendance, the homework take-up routine, and showing instructional videos of any kind come readily to mind. Supervising study periods was absolute torture, especially in the past decade when students simply refuse, or are unable to, stop fidgeting and chatting. No wonder creative teachers go a little haywire sometimes!
What comes next for the researchers? Eastwood and his colleagues hope to help in the discovery and development of new strategies that ease the problems of boredom sufferers and address the potential dangers of cognitive errors that are often associated with boredom. That cannot come soon enough for countless numbers of students — and a great many socially-aware educators. After all, even wiz-bang Power Point presentations and You Tube videos are starting to wear thin with today’s generation of students.
Why are today’s students so easily bored? Are students, particularly in high school, being challenged enough — or simply being entertained? Why are the Canadian researchers focusing so much on on defining boredom when what we really need are strategies to improve the quality of teaching, revitalize student learning and foster student re-engagement?
In our just-released report, “Real Accountability or an Illusion of Success?: A Call to Review Standardized Testing in Ontario” (http://testingillusion.ca), we explore how the practice of standardized assessment may have an impact on the classroom experience of students. Learning entails the acquisition of knowledge, skills and other cognitive abilities: creativity, problem-solving, understanding, analytical thinking and the development of critical thinking skills, among others. However, standardized testing tends to measure a more limited set of functional knowledge and skills within the tested subject areas. As momentum was building for standardized testing in Ontario in the 1990s, one researcher was encouraging policymakers to remember the lessons of the American experience: “As early as the late 1970s, evidence began to accumulate showing that high-stakes standardized testing policies were highly corruptible… and that the use of standardized tests for accountability had actually narrowed curricula and driven instruction increasingly towards… memorization and basic skills rather than improving educational quality.”
This effect may occur in part because of the methods required to implement standardized tests on a large scale and evaluate results in an efficient manner.
For example, tests tend to use multiple choice questionnaires and short open-ended written responses, which favour convergent thinking (i.e., correct responses versus incorrect responses) and short-term memory and recall. By contrast, such tests are not readily adapted to fostering the development of creativity and higher-order thinking skills suppor- ting instructional techniques such as discovery-based learning, which encourages students’ discovery of solutions through interactions with their environment, wrestling with multifaceted and ambiguous questions, and the performing of experiments.
For this reason, we called for a panel to be formed so that it might conduct a review of the extent to which standardized testing is influencing the teaching of higher-order thinking skills (which is linked to higher levels of student engagement) in classrooms.
We have also created a “truly weird little video” as a discussion piece on the subject: http://youtu.be/ramucjnTGGs. Enjoy!
Robert Marzano and Debra Pickering wrote The Highly Engaged Classroom a couple of years ago.
Worth reading for this topic.
John Hattie’s interpretation of thousands of research studies around the world suggests, among other things, teachers talk too much and students too little.
So how do we talk less so that students learn more through engagement?
Why are today’s students so easily bored?
Because the wrong people are doing the teaching. great students make good researchers not good teachers… Classrooms need communicators not researchers at the front. But the teaching professions yearn for academic respectability has driven up the academic credentials resulting in more researcher types in the classroom while students after increasingly bored.
What we need are better assessments of everyone entering teachers college… Simply raising the academic bar repeatedly does not recruit those with gifts and abilities to communicate which is what teaching at the elementary and secondary levels is about. Better screening perhaps including video auditions for teachers college could help address the problem.
[…] Teachers sense when students are bored in the classroom. Eyes glaze over, their minds drift off, and a pall descends upon the class. The tendency is to drone on, repeating your points, perhaps ev… […]
Many teachers note boredom and try to deal with it, but too many do not- based on observations of thousands of teachers over 30 years.
When I was a student I was bored sometimes and some teachers bored me all the time, but the penalties for misbehaviour were severe and i knew I wanted to go on to post secondary. My peers who did not want to go on (and in the early-mid 1960s that was a majority) simply dropped out.
Today there are so many distractions for kids we have to work harder to engage and get them to focus and participate and put effort in.
Fortunately we can meet the challenge. High tech and pop culture, appropriately used can support our efforts. I have seen many examples of this, even with student teachers.
One of Canada’s most original bloggers, Royan Lee of Spicy Learning, addresses the seasonal problem of laconic students and teachers from a different angle. He’s a working teacher of the intermediate grades in Richmond Hill, Ontario, and just posted a piece on the “February Blahs.” It’s entitled “Goodbye to Failure” and here’s the link:
http://spicylearning.wordpress.com/2013/03/02/goodbye-to-failure-february-embrace-the-failure/
It may be a little off-beat, but provides a little more fodder for our online discussion.
I believe opinions are sharply divided amongst teachers. Some feel -so they are bored, so what, this stuff is boring and I have no responsibility to spice it up. Boredom is the real test of whether they are a good student or not. Good students use postponed gratification and boredom sorts out who can take it. The easily bored don’t belong in school or at least should be in trades. In short, boredom is not an issue.
Other teachers go too much the other way. Everybody knows the fun teacher who was not very demanding and had dubious standards. He/she cracked a lot of jokes and showed a lot of films.
Parents of low achieving students question their kids who respond, “how do you expect me to learn this stuff it is boring?” Parents hear than and blame the boring school or teacher and not their unmotivated kid.
Teachers find kids who complain about boredom to be shallow and weak. Teachers expect their classes to be full of John Myers types, “man this is boring but if I want to get anywhere, I better pay attention and learn it anyway.”
As Doug implies, what teachers expect and what they get are often different.
When I worked on my doctorate in the early 1990s my school board was pushing me HARD to do it on the destreaming issue.
– both streaming and destreaming were badly implemented (I was and still am on the destreaming side and the evidence supports me.)
One issue was that lower streamed or “tracked” classes got more boring stuff presented in more boring ways.
That still happens.
If some students are more likely to go into the workplace sooner with its demand for skills such as those in the Ontario Report Card (team work, organization, initiative, etc.) why are they denied the chance to develop these skills and competencies and instead get lectures and work sheets?
That is educational malpractice (a John Hattie phrase)
I know Doug will offer his reasons and others of a different perspective will offer theirs. In any case this situation should not happen for any reason.
I seem to remember seeing a documentary about schools in Palestine and being impressed by how motivated the students were (under very adverse circumstances). The crucial factor seemed to be neither neuroscience nor religion but a shared sense of purpose. The children also seemed very mature for their age.
If we had a similar sense of purpose and if teenagers were obliged to leave their edutainment bubbles and were able to experience something outside school that drives home the message about how much we still have to do (preferably without sniper fire or cluster bombs), perhaps the neuroscientific indicators would move a notch higher.
Just a thought, albeit of no practical significance whatsoever.
We had a lively discussion on this issue in my school community last fall after I posted this blog! http://www.learningtolearn-differently.com/2/post/2012/11/are-you-bored-yet.html
Good to know about you AND your blog!
What hasn’t yet been mentioned is that from the moment they are born, we actively train children to become bored easily. Lured by the promise of creating “more intelligent children,” we hang complex mechanized mobiles which play music over their cribs. We not only paint infants’ rooms in stimulating colours – we ensure that everything with which they come into contact is stimulating. And we ensure that they come into contact with a lot of things. Kids’ books are increasingly engaging – with playful sounds, colourful details, entertaining characters, sounds, textures, etc. Kids’ television shows, movies, and video games are also increasingly engrossing, with complex plots, well-developed characters, dazzling graphics, and well-crafted soundtracks. These things are wonderful in themselves. Who doesn’t like a beautifully-made film? A gripping bedtime story? An enthralling video game? These things are awesome.
However, when humans are perpetually exposed to these awesome things for MOST OF THEIR WAKING LIFE, other, less “incredible” things (such as sitting quietly in a classroom and learning about conjunctive adverbs) lose their ability to captivate. In the age of the hyperreal, of the simulacrum, and of augmented realities, normalcy is, frankly, less interesting. Boring, even.
I wish teachers actually WERE to blame for boring children, since the problem could quite easily be addressed by either getting rid of boring teachers or by teaching them to use technologies and other flashy things that would make their teaching less boring. But the cards we’re dealing ourselves are simply not that good. We’re stuck with a 7-2 off suit, and no one to blame but our own best intentions… Our attempts at measuring the success of the system with standardized tests even help ENSURE that instruction is boring, since our measures focus on lower-level cognitive skills. While Education Ministries, districts, schools, administrators and teachers can indeed do a lot to make their offerings more engaging and relevant, this will not “suddenly” make school riveting for the children of supermodernity. Dime-store answers simply won’t solve the “problem,” since the “problem” is rooted deep, in the very fabric of 21st Century society.
Thank you, Jim, for posting your nicely written piece, “Are you bored, yet?” It’s certainly germane to this online discussion. At your school in British Columbia, I see that the emphasis is on “learning to learn” and helping kids to become “self-directed learners.” Those, as you know, are popular buzzwords. Knowing you, as well as I do, I can see those becoming more than just empty phrases.
I particularly like the way you explain the place of working hard, at times, to achieve mastery, opening up more doors for learning:
“If we want students to be capable, self-directed learners then we have to give them not only the tools to be successful, but to foster the attitudes that lead to success. Time dedicated to Social/Emotional Learning at our school is at least as well spent as hours on Language Arts and Mathematics. Students need to develop the confidence that they can learn, and that they can succeed in both school and in the larger world; and, they need to develop the ethic that, although some things don’t come easily, they will come eventually, with hard work and parental and school support. If the outcomes are worthwhile, the attainment of them should be intrinsically exciting.”
You, quite rightly, note that “boring is in the eye of the beholder”. It is, as I have learned, a matter of trying to awaken in students that inner passion that makes work effortless and time simply fly by. Sir Ken Robinson termed it “the element” and when you find it boredom completely disappears.
I like John Myers post-I feel kids are more engaged if we talk less and ask them questions and get them talking more than we are-think Socrates-the Socratic method is brilliant.I also feel multisensory instruction is far more interesting-eg.talk about the war of 1812-show a movie and develop an art project showing the battle.
Just talking is a disaster,for sure.
In a 2008 New York Times article – “Yet boredom is more than a mere flagging of interest or a precursor to mischief. Some experts say that people tune things out for good reasons, and that over time boredom becomes a tool for sorting information — an increasingly sensitive spam filter. In various fields including neuroscience and education, research suggests that falling into a numbed trance allows the brain to recast the outside world in ways that can be productive and creative at least as often as they are disruptive.
In a recent paper in The Cambridge Journal of Education, Teresa Belton and Esther Priyadharshini of East Anglia University in England reviewed decades of research and theory on boredom, and concluded that it’s time that boredom “be recognized as a legitimate human emotion that can be central to learning and creativity.”
It goes on to state – ” Using brain-imaging technology, neuroscientists have found that the brain is highly active when disengaged, consuming only about 5 percent less energy in its resting “default state” than when involved in routine tasks, according to Dr. Mark Mintun, a professor of radiology at Washington University in St. Louis.”
Rather interesting, since Dr. Eastwood’s working theory on boring is suggesting that the state of boredom, is an attention problem, that leads to stress. In a Wall Street Journal article – “In another recent paper, Dr. Eastwood and two colleagues set out to write the ultimate scientific definition of boredom, culling through decades of research papers to assemble a description of the phenomenon. Their definition describes an unpleasant state of “wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity,” caused by problems with the brain’s ability to pay attention.
Bored people typically blame their environment, not themselves, for the state, thinking “this task is boring” or “there is nothing to do,” the paper found.”
The Wall Street Journal article, like the most recent articles speaking about Dr. Eastwood’s research on boredom, all suggest that not only does it cause mental distress, but also when discussing it in an education environment, the blame is placed on the student’s personal SES factors, and its the student’s responsibility to fixed their boredom state. “For one thing, boredom has serious consequences for health and productivity, they say, linked to depression, overeating, substance abuse, gambling and even mortality—people may, indirectly, be “bored to death.”
So at one end – mental stress and at the other end creativity? So which one is it? Perhaps both. Another leader in the boredom field, is Dr. Judy Willis Neurologist/Teacher/Grad School Ed faculty/Author.
Dr. Willis presents a different perspective on boredom, tying in the relevant parts of the brain to the experience in the classroom. “To promote engagement and effort, students need early opportunities to find personal pleasure and relevance in the material they need to learn. Knowing from the start that they will produce representations of the learning creatively is an inoculation against boredom and low effort. When creative representation of learning through the arts is introduced from the beginning, sustained or interspersed throughout a unit, and recognized by the students as valued because these representations are part of their assessments of learning, the brain perceives a greater possibility that effort will be rewarded by pleasure and success.”
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/radical-teaching/201012/inoculate-against-boredom
What Dr. Judy Willis had found by going into the classroom – ” What she found, in terms of of demeanour, was boredom and frustration.
The students who quickly understood what was being taught were exhibiting behaviours clearly indicating that they were extremely bored and those who failed to understand were exhibiting behaviours clearly indicating that they were frustrated.
If you watch the video, you will hear exactly how and why the behaviours had been misdiagnosed as clinical pathologies.
http://www.iijiij.com/2013/01/21/neurologist-pivots-to-schoolteacher-then-to-teaching-teachers-neuroscience-015500
This has been one of the most civil, and in part because of that, informative
threads on any of the ed blogs I check. A couple on Voiced rival it.
Thanks.
I agree with John, however the main problem begins at the streaming stage. As an anti-streamer, I believe it has to go in stages that we are ready for. i would destream up to grade 10, them concentrate on elementary school for a few years with a very heavy emphasis on the poor schools where the bottom stream kids come from and raise their levels almost as Malcolm X said “by any means necessary…” after that grade 11 and 12 could be destreamed with a lot of care.
Finland splits the kids in an academic vs technical way half way through HS but the tech wing is a serious educational choice not a quick path to unemployment.
An enjoyable curriculum is not just what happens in one teachers class but full art, music, phys ed, “shop for everybody” field trips, and so on.
Great to see an engaged and informed discussion on boredom. My own perspective is focussed on the effects of traumatic brain injury which often leads to increased boredom and how we might deal with that in a rehabilitative sense. But the implications of my boredom research for the education system are not lost on me. As it stands we are still “theorising” about the causes and basic cognitive mechanisms that make up the experience of boredom. Our working theory at the moment (and clearly ours is only one of many) is that boredom arises as a consequence of a mismatch between expectations and outcomes – going into an activity expecting some level of stimulation and finding the experience to be wanting essentially leads to boredom – particularly if you are stuck in that experience. It may also be the case that the boredom prone individual fails to accurately perceive novelty – everything has a sameness to them. Both of these notions are just that at this stage – notions that need a lot more research. But what might it mean for education? In my opinion the major consequence is the unremarkable discovery that 60 and 90 minute classes are untenable for most people. But we do run a fine line of pandering to an already short attention span. So 15 minute classes are also likely to fail – but what about 30 minutes? And we have to choose horses for courses – 30 minutes of phys ed is not enough – but for calculus maybe it works. Perhaps the other consequence that occurs to me is a need to have children be real stakeholders in their own education. This is challenging and difficult and always evolving. But we know that when people feel that they have had a say in how their environment functions, it works a lot better.
Great to have you in the conversation, James.
(Editor’s Note: For the benefit of our contributors, Dr. Danckert is one of those leading researchers cited in the Wall Street Journal as a leader in the new research field).
Very interesting James. To me there is also relevance issue. There is a mismatch between what the government and adult society believes young people must know and the attention span and engagement of some young people. Sometimes one must learn the scales (boring) before playing music (interesting).
I was a history teacher. I found staying on great narratives and big ideas worked. Facts did not work.
I would have about 10 dates in context in the whole of human history,
Fall of Roman Empire, Columbus, Chinese Fleet, to Africa, American and French revolutions, W of 1812, 1837 rebellions. Confederation, WW1, WW2, Chinese Revolution, Sputnik, Fall of SU, Sept 11. That was it. That would mean about 3-4 dates per course. More than that mindless memory work.
Thanks Doug. As Paul well knows, we often tee-ed off against the “history as story” crowd. They insisted on a regimented recitation of dates, places, and “facts” as being the key to an effective understanding of the past and lamented our approach of inquiry, problem solving and learner directed discovery. There were definitely too many facts left out!
To be honest, I was bored listening to them myself!
[…] Boredom in the Classroom: Why are So Many Students Bored — and What Can Be Done? | Educhatter̵… […]
I can remember the faces in a Toronto School Board meeting when I called heavy fact orientation Trivial Pursuit . They were not amused.
Boredom is of interest in the business field – “How Boredom Promulgates Creativity in Business”
http://www.triplepundit.com/2012/11/boredom-promulgates-creativity-business/
In a science blog – “Understanding boredom and attention as connected has potential to improve how we deal with both. “Because we know quite a lot about how attention operates, this information could allow us to quantify the situations that lead to boredom,” said neuroscientist Jonathan Smallwood of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences.
Research indicates that once people have taken note of boredom-provoking conditions, they can get some relief by just tuning into the conflicts that are making them feel bored.”
http://scitechdaily.com/curing-boredom/
Anyone remember this quote – “”The only horrible thing in the world is ennui, Dorian. That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.”
Even Wikipedia, has a page on boredom.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boredom
In another article about Eastwood’s research – “As the authors of the review point out, these negative feelings can actually impair later performance. Stress can decrease people’s ability to pay attention and can narrow people’s working memory capacity. These effects can be a particular problem in school settings. Students need to be able to work at peak capacity to get the most out of school. So, boredom can create long-term difficulties for students.”
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/201209/what-is-boredom
I had no idea that boredom, or at least the word has been around since ancient Greece times. I even learned that boredom is a sin from a Christian perspective. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/The-History-of-Boredom-180161211.html?c=y&page=1
Finally, a quote from a blog called Frontal Cortex – “So Brodsky was right: boredom can have important benefits. We should learn to savor the slowness of time: all those long nights and tedious drives are a great chance to slip into our “default” mode of thought. We banish boredom at our own peril.”
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/03/24/boredom/
Being bored, I decided to explored the links of the last link, and who is Joseph Brodsky? Being bored does lead you to interesting places on the net. I hit the jackpot on boredom research articles. “This is the first of eight articles on boredom.” – and to go to the next one, just press the link at the top that is under ‘next message’. http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/paleopsych/2005-May/003251.html
Being bored can’t be all that bad, unless one is sitting in the classroom. I am beginning to gained some insight on boredom. I have a question. The connection between underachievers and boredom in a school setting. Just wondering, being a classic underachiever – I suspect that boredom in the classroom could be reduced in a number of ways, without added expense or the hiring of a high price boredom consultant.
What an excellent post, Dr. Bennett! I fondly recall our grade 10 history class (everything from talking about Preston Manning in your office to holding a seance with “Mackenzie King”)! And who could forget the scorpion in the bottle “live-action” analogy for the tension of the Cold War.
I completely agree with the overall message: boredom is a real challenge and problem in the classroom. Fortunately, in university I have seen a lot less of it from other students than my days in senior school (due to a combination of focused interest and maturity I suspect).
As you are well accustomed to, adding a different “flavor” and mixing up classroom activities can go a long way in refocusing students attention. Routine is popular among adults – not necessarily among teenagers.
[…] Teachers sense when students are bored in the classroom. Eyes glaze over, their minds drift off, and a pall descends upon the class. The tendency is to drone on, repeating your points, perhaps ev… […]
thanks for the link to an interesting database of ideas. Some of these I have nut one stop shopping can be good.
thanks for the link to an interesting database of ideas. Some of these I have BUT one stop shopping can be good.
[…] are a tough crowd. Boredom in the Classroom: Why are So Many Students Bored — and What Can Be Done? Teachers sense when students are bored in the classroom. Eyes glaze over, their minds drift off, […]
[…] Teachers sense when students are bored in the classroom. Eyes glaze over, their minds drift off, and a pall descends upon the class. The tendency is to drone on, repeating your points, perhaps ev… […]
Well I believe that a teacher is responsible for his/her class environment. If a teacher makes it a habit to make his students get engaged in class, there is no chance of his students getting bored.
[…] you grew up in the Canadian school system, then you already know it’s pretty boring. We don’t do a lot of exciting things. School’s job is hit on these four […]