Jonathan Schooler

In this project, researchers aim to expand and improve an existing digital intervention called Finding Focus that is intended to help high school students train their attention and then use it to more effectively regulate distracting thoughts and emotions. Specifically, key innovations will include (i) advanced personalization of the intervention to students' aspirations, (ii) an expanded curriculum that addresses the pervasive distraction of digital media, and (iii) new methods for ensuring...

The purpose of this project is to develop and pilot test a scalable, multimedia mindfulness training program tailored to high school students and based on insights from cognitive science and educational psychology. Despite teachers' best efforts, students' ability to pay attention and absorb information is frequently compromised by distraction and mind-wandering. To help students improve their ability to focus their attention, mindfulness training programs are being introduced into schools t...

Good reading comprehension requires that the readers attend to the material in front of them. However, despite readers' best intentions, there are times when their minds wander, and they find that although they have "read" a span of text, they did not actually process the content. This "mind wandering" is common and can affect all levels of language processing, including understanding words and parsing sentences. The current project will explore mind wandering in the context of reading to de...

In this project, the researchers intended to refine and approve a recently developed theoretical perspective for investigating the experience of "zoning out" while reading, also known as "mind wandering", and study the pedagogical implications of these occurrences. In the early 2000s, there was little research that directly examined the role that such experiences play in reading comprehension and whether any negative consequences mind wandering might lead to could be addressed by some sort o...