For example, the noun “ soup” could go with eat, drink or cook. They also made the task more challenging by using nouns that could correspond to several verbs. For example, if they heard the noun milk, they might respond with the word drink. Their study involved a word-matching game in which the participants hear a noun and then they had to say a verb that could be logically used with the noun. Researchers Shogo Kajimura and Michio Naumra from the University of Kyoto conducted a study with 26 people. Not only children but also adults tend to be able to concentrate better when they avert their gaze. Their averted eye-gaze could be a sign that they are thinking and need some time. The researchers suggest that teachers should not quickly scold students if they stop looking at a teacher when asked a question. Don’t take it personal if your students aren’t looking at you. The students who looked away when trying to think of the answer got 61% correct while the students who kept eye-contact got only 37% right. They found that the students who had been trained to look away from the questioner’s face answered 72% of the questions correctly, but the untrained group were right only 55% of the time.Īlso, for the difficult questions, there was an even bigger difference. The questions had a range from easy to more difficult. Then, the researchers asked each student a series of math and verbal questions. The other 10 students received no eye-contact training. Instead of looking at the eyes of the questioner, they looked at a blank piece of paper on the floor. They trained 10 of these students to look away while they were trying to think of an answer to a question. For their study, they used 20 five-year-old children from a primary school. Psychologists in Scotland wanted to find out how much “gaze aversion” (ending eye-contact) affected children’s concentration. While adults practice this look-away about 85 percent of the time, children five years old and younger do it just 40 percent of the time.” Study: Students trained to look away performed better. In her article, “ Looking Away Helps Concentration” in Live Science, Jeanne Bryner wrote that “Scientists have found that adults tend to turn their gaze away from a questioner’s face when they were asked a thought-provoking question. Researchers recently discovered that when school children look away from their teacher, they are much more likely to think of the correct answer to a question that the teacher has asked. As a result, people will occasionally look away in order to save mental energy. Trying hard to maintain eye-contact can reduce our mental bandwidth. If we are looking at someone while they are talking to us, our brains are using energy trying to read their faces and, at the same time, concentrate on what they are saying. In fact, surprisingly, research suggests that other students might have benefited from doing just what Emily was doing - gazing away from me.Īlthough the ability to make eye contact is important, researchers have found that faces can be distracting. Recently, I learned that I didn’t necessarily need to be concerned about Emily’s lack of eye contact with me. Thinking that she was daydreaming, I wondered whether I should say her name or ask her a question to “bring her back” to the classroom. While explaining a writing technique to my students, I noticed that one of them, Emily, was staring off to the side. A good reason not to be upset if students don’t look directly at you during a lesson or conversation.
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