Attention Span is influenced by Age in Young Children
Jane Doe
University
Abstract
This study looks at the effect of age and attention span in female preschool children. It was expected that older children will exhibit a greater attention span that younger children will. Two children were chosen to be observed, both female, ages 2 and 4 years. The children were watched for 15 minutes each, 3 consecutive 5-minute intervals. The amount of times an activity was switched was logged. Attention span was defined in terms of how often activities were changed. A high attention span was when a child changed activities less than 3 times in 5 minutes. A low attention span was when a child switched activities 3 or more time in 5 minutes. This study maintained the hypothesis showing that older children revealed a higher attention span than younger children.
Attention Span is influenced by Age in Young Children
Attention span is an important part of learning and enables children to have a well-developed mind. Since one’s childhood enables children to form and combine important features of the subjects being studied in class, the attention of children has developed into a hot topic. Therefore, attention span has been focused on quite a bit in many studies. Research indicates that attention span, persistence and delay ability increase with age (Silverman & Gaines, 1996). This shows that older children in preschool years are expected to have a greater ability to focus on activities for longer periods of time. Other researchers have shown that children who are more comfortable with their caretakers have a better attention span than the children who don’t know their caretaker (Kim, Kirby, Paula & Ben, 2010). This suggests that children who were playing with the volunteer in the classroom may have changed activities more often because they weren’t accustomed to him.
The aim of this study was to observe the differences in attention span versus age of the...