“Students aren’t paying attention,” “they use ChatGPT for everything”… these are comments and perceptions shared in university circles. But can we transform these feelings into something measurable and, above all, into useful tools for teachers?
In our recent teacher training project (with 15 teachers from Engineering, Law, Psychology, Journalism, Nursing and Botany) we tried precisely that: to practice minimal but effective interventions to increase attention in digitally saturated classrooms.
We worked with them on small changes to help students concentrate better and avoid constant interruptions from their devices, focusing on two key areas: reducing screen time during critical moments and redesigning artificial intelligence to activate critical thinking. The results are pending publication, but the pilot program already shows high teacher adoption and observable changes in the classroom.
This is something that is also being done in other universities to recover a skill that is more fragile today than it seems: deep thinking.
Care as a tradable resource
The attention economy “hijacks” our mental time with constant notifications, instant rewards, and personalized content designed to hook us.
Because it is optimized to interrupt , the digital environment takes our minds in the opposite direction to our cognitive needs at university: sustained concentration, deep reading, and tolerance for effort.
In a classroom with laptops—or even with a smartphone nearby, even if not in use—attention can suffer: multitasking on a computer hinders learning in class, and the mere presence of a phone reduces available cognitive capacity . Digital distraction in education is not anecdotal, but structural .
Deep and superficial focus
In the 1970s, Swedish researchers F. Marton and R. Säljö identified two distinct ways of approaching learning:
- The in-depth approach is characterized by seeking the personal meaning of the subject matter, relating new ideas to prior knowledge, and examining the internal logic of arguments.
- A surface approach is activated when the student perceives the task as an external imposition and resorts to the rote memorization of isolated facts to meet minimum requirements. In the current context, a deep approach is suffering.
In an environment of chronic distraction, many students stop experiencing occasional interruptions and begin to reconfigure their usual way of studying : from understanding, integrating and relating, they move to “getting by”, memorizing the minimum and moving on to the next screen.
Risk profiles
It doesn’t happen to all students equally: if we only look at averages, we won’t see the at-risk profiles : those students who combine learning strategies according to the pressure of the moment and who are not always able to access the deep approach.
We could say that these students are learning “in survival mode,” forced into a fast, efficient, and dangerously fragile learning process. The damage doesn’t appear “all at once” on the exam; it occurs earlier, in very concrete things like the quality of their notes and how they develop their ideas during class.
Working on screen
The superficiality here isn’t a lack of intelligence, but rather a lack of the capacity for elaboration: key ideas are lost, fewer concepts are connected, and there’s less checking for understanding. Not only is there more external distraction, but also a diminished capacity to resist it.
This pattern becomes especially problematic in academic reading. Meta-analyses on reading comprehension have found, on average, a certain advantage of paper over screen, because the digital version makes it easier to become distracted (interruptions, navigation, scanning) and makes overestimating comprehension more frequent, resulting in a poorer assessment of what has actually been understood .
Evidence-based interventions
What can the university do about this problem? The evidence points to several complementary strategies:
- Structuring the academic use of devices : defining when they add value (search, simulation, guided activity) and when they hinder (explanation, debate, reading), with clear classroom rules.
- Self-regulated learning training : teaching (and practicing) how to plan study time, maintain attention, and resist distractions. It can be integrated into courses or offered as workshops, and specific university programs with trainable and assessable routines already exist.
- Mindfulness training : improvements in working memory and less mental wandering are achieved , which can help to return to focus when the environment pushes you to leave it .
- Friction by design : small obstacles that make it less automatic to get distracted and easier to stay focused on the task. For example, leaving your phone out of reach, activating the “Do Not Disturb” function, and scheduling temporary blocks to prevent switching tabs or networks for 25 minutes.
A coherent package, not isolated actions
There is no magic bullet: digital distraction varies depending on the context, and what is usually effective is a coherent package of classroom design, tasks, and culture, plus skills training. In practice, a hybrid intervention works best: reducing distractions at critical times, structuring technology when it adds value, and training attention/self-regulation to sustain deep thinking.
The attention economy cannot be overcome with a poster: it is managed with design and with skills that allow the student to think long, read deeply and argue rigorously.
Author Bio: José Manuel de Haro García is Full Professor, Business Organization (HR and Organizational Behavior) at Miguel Hernández University
