How are attention and engagement related to each other?
Attention is a component of engagement, so figuring out the relationship
between the two is tricky. Some early studies (Dunst, McWilliam, & Holbert, 1986) separated
attentional from active engagement but didn’t really look at attention as
a stand-alone construct. In the early days of figuring out engagement, I read
quite a bit of Michael Lewis’s work.
Within engagement, my colleagues and I pay attention to casual attention, as an indicator of indifferentiated
engagement, and focused attention. The former appears to have less value—at
least, we put it lower on the developmental hierarchy than we do focused
attention.
Can a child spend much
time attending yet not be engaged? If it were casual attention (looking
around), we’d consider it low engagement. But if it were focused
attention, we’d consider it good engagement. Because we work with young
children, however, we know that too much focused attention without accompanying
manipulative (i.e., active) engagement could be a bad thing. Children with
cerebral palsy have shown us that attentional engagement can go only so far; it’s
better for a child to have actual control over his or her environment.
Attention even more than engagement, therefore, seems necessary but not
sufficient. Can a child spend much time engaged yet not be attending? At first,
we might think so: The child who is very appropriately active appears not to spend
much time just looking. But we do use eye gaze (i.e., looking) to help judge what
a child is interested in. So, even in active engagement, attention plays a
role.
People who like to
categorize children (and don’t we all, in some ways?) might think of some
children as watchers and others as doers. We know better than to consider these
“learning styles,” yet they might describe how children make sense
of their environment. Some might attend first and then experiment; others might
jump in first—and then probably never spend a lot of time attending.
Another place where
attention has an interesting role is in mastery pleasure, when a child looks at
what he or she has accomplished, indicating to us adults that the child finds
the accomplishment reinforcing. Compare this to the child who does something
and shows no affective response. We don’t know whether that kid found the
activity reinforcing or not, unless he or she returns to it, which after all is
the definition of reinforcement.Attention and engagement, therefore, are intertwined but it research is needed to find out more about the connection between the two.
