Cueing Attention

Hey 👋

Hope you had a nice equinox. Today… [strategic pause] another snack on attention.

Big idea 🍉

Attention is central to learning. However, it is limited, prone to wander, and not naturally attracted to the things we teach in school. As such, we must actively orchestrate it.

One of the ways we can best do this is via ‘attentional cueing’. Cueing is the use of a stimulus to attract attention to a particular thing. For example, using:

• Our environment: Dimming the lights and drawing the blinds can draw student focus to the board (harnessing a kind of ‘cinema effect’).

• Our tech: We can use arrows, colours, live modelling or gradual reveal (just be sure to keep things accessible).

• Our voices: Strategic pauses, repetition, repetition, and changes in tone or cadence can signal key info (see clip below).

• Our bodies: We can point, tap, clap or gesture to direct attention (and even to help flesh out concepts).

Being precise in our cueing is important because (A) novices don’t always know exactly which part of the thing we’re presenting to focus on, (B) there is a cognitive cost to filtering out redundant information, and (C) it helps our more vulnerable students to be even more successful.

Gesturing and live modelling are particularly powerful, because (A) students benefit from a 'mirror neuron' type effect (where we learn as much from watching someone do something as doing it ourselves), and (B) memory models (eg. Baddeley's multicomponent) suggest that we can process human movements with minimal additional attentional cost, and so: get a kind of free working memory boost.

Many of us will do lots of this stuff already, but (as with many things in teaching), there’s probably room for us to be even more intentional in our approach. The more precise we are in our cueing, the more our students will learn.

🎓 For more, check out this paper on how cueing can support learning.

Summary

• Attention is the basis of learning—cueing is one way to direct student attention.

• There are many ways we can cue, from highlighting text on the board to pausing strategically before key vocab.

• We do lots of this naturally, but there’s probably scope for us to cue even more intentionally.

Little updates 🥕

• Survey of new (Spanish) teachers beliefs about learning → finds widespread misconceptions, highlighting need for stronger evidence-based PD.

• Study of 350k Norwegian children → finds that younger siblings do better at school if their older sibling is a sister (partly bc of social skills dividend).

• Meta-analysis of multimedia learning studies → highlights design principles (like personalisation, modality, text+diagrams) which reliably boost learning.

• Meta-analysis of classroom management → finds small but consistent gains in behaviour, learning, and wellbeing, favouring focused over broad strategies.

Upgrade your evidence edge → Get Snacks PRO