Andy (00:02)
Welcome to the HigherEdJobs podcast. I'm Andy Hibel the Chief Operating Officer and one of the co-founders of HigherEdJobs.

Kelly (00:08)
And I'm Kelly Cherwin, the director of editorial strategy. Today we're joined by Dr. Michelle Miller, professor of psychological sciences at Northern Arizona university and an expert in attention memory and teaching in higher education. Dr. Miller is an internationally recognized scholar whose work explores the intersection of psychology, pedagogy and technology. She has spent over two decades teaching and conducting research at Northern Arizona university, where she also serves as a leader in initiatives focused on student learning and success.

She's the author of several influential books, including Minds Online, Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology, and A Teacher's Guide to Learning Student Names. Through her writing, speaking, and faculty development work, she has helped educators translate cognitive science into strategies that can be applied in the classroom. Michelle, thanks again for joining us.

Dr. Michelle Miller (00:57)
Thank you, it's great to be here.

Mike (00:59)
Thank you for returning and remembering to listen to the second half of our interview with Dr. Michelle Miller. Let's rejoin the conversation and continue exploring ways to help students stay focused in learning environments filled with distractions.

Andy (01:13)
It's interesting when I read this question in preparation for the podcast, it made me think of law school. And ⁓ definitely the dynamic nature, fast moving nature of it. And you can say tax law. Well, yeah, that's what everybody dreams about learning about. Like, this was not a subject that people dreamed about learning about. Everybody avoided his class. I ended up loving it. So I just found that to kind of stick with me as we were kind of talking about attention.

I've never paid attention like I paid attention in that class. So I tried my best to not be the person who got stuck on the hot seat.

Dr. Michelle Miller (01:51)
Great, perfect example.

Kelly (01:54)
So Andy, you set me up then for those people who did not pay attention then. So Michelle, you also, we talked about you study memory and retention. So when I'm thinking about this question, kind of, there's a debate in my house. I like to listen to books on audio and my husband prefers to read them. And I've heard people say, I can't listen to them because I get distracted and then I don't understand it. I have no idea what's happening in the book.

I know this happens in the classroom, like someone might have the best intentions to be zoned in and listening to you, but maybe they're thinking, my God, I just blew that midterm or I'm having an issue with a friend and they get distracted. So how does this lapse in attention during the class impact what we're retaining and what we're learning? And I guess adding onto that, like, how can we recover that? What can we do about that?

Dr. Michelle Miller (02:48)
Yeah, and that recovery issue is a tough one. Now, strictly speaking from a cognitive psychology perspective, yeah, memory and attention are so tightly linked. It's really hard to talk about one without talking about the other. So yeah, for all practical purposes, like this is my summer, about the last 40 years of cognitive psychology research tells us that

Basically, if you don't have focused attention on something, you do not have a memory for it. And there's some edge cases ⁓ and things we can quibble about. especially with the type of, you know, what we're remembering, the form of memory that's involved in classroom learning oftentimes, it's new information and new connections. And those really eat up attentional focus, and they just don't happen.

And so, especially if we have a of a folk conception of memory, which does survive. There's research documenting this, that some people on some level, including our students, believe in sort of what I call the security camera in the head theory. ⁓ I'm sure I'm thinking about this thing, but somehow there's a tape in there that I can rewind. And I'm sorry, there's no tape. We've never found the tape.

So I'm if that's it's a little scary But yes where attention goes radically determines what memories are from and you see that for example an eyewitness memory and like how can all the people remember different things where there's Reasons for that but one of them is where is attention even focused? So yeah, it will wipe out your memory not to be ⁓ Not to be focused at the time now that said we no longer live in the 14th century where the instructors

Relating of the content is the only way to ever get back to that content. So there's lots of redundancies as far as the material itself. To the extent that there's revisiting, that's where students need good study strategies and metacognition to say, is there a knowledge guide? Is there a quiz that, say, a very forward-thinking instructor's put together to help students check their understanding as we go? Because that's part of it, too, is not only is there no tape,

There's no break in the tape to say, here's what you didn't get. You're the last to know. We have some pretty dramatic illusions and things like that. I like to show students to be like, yeah, you had no clue, right? There was no indication. So it's a precarious position to be in. So I think that's where we do have those, if not just straight repetitions, those revisiting, those redundancies, they like, okay, we just talked about

⁓ the difference between negative reinforcement and positive reinforcement. Now here's a set of scenarios for you to actually categorize, ⁓ you didn't get it. So that can prime that knowledge. And that play between attention and memory may be also a pre-questioning is so amazing and useful. So we found, for example, that when you just kind of passively review something and you didn't get it the first time, you probably won't get it the second or third time. Your brain has kind of figured,

I don't need this and I'm not gonna focus on it nor retain it. However, if I ask you a question, like I recently asked an audience, what are the five oceans of the world? I know everybody's seen it, but it's like, can you rattle those off? Well, probably you can't get all of them, but now if you review the five oceans of the world, suddenly it sticks. So kind of playing with that curiosity, pre-questioning and so on, but also putting that in the hands of students.

So yeah, students are, we all check out sometimes, students are going to miss things. You can't just rewind and hope for the best. So how can students realize that, build that focus in class, resolve to have better practices while they're in the classroom, and also when they're out of the classroom, have a really bomb-proof set of study strategies to fall back on that will fill those in. So you see, there's an interplay of some of these different themes we've been talking about.

But that's what we can really confidently say when it comes to memory and attention. It's an important relationship, a critical relationship, and one that is incredibly easy to disrupt, which is where our students run into trouble, along with all the rest of us.

Andy (07:11)
Wow, I'm sure everybody is now Googling what are the five oceans while they're listening and multitasking. So we just lost some people. And if they are doing that, if they're brushing up on trivia, also, if you're going to do the five oceans, let's do the five spice girls too. Cause who knows when there's 90s music trivia, cause I can never name them all. Is there five? There are five.

Kelly (07:33)
Say, don't remember.

Andy (07:34)
⁓ If you know the five, please email us at podcast at higher jobs.com or send us a direct message at higher

Kelly (07:41)
And you'll be on the podcast. will discuss the Spice Girls. No kidding. ⁓

Andy (07:45)
⁓ I think you just made the essential case for why this is so important. So I'm not even going to ask you about that, but what I would want to point out just real quick, I also think you've made the essential case for some disabilities like hearing loss, why they're so impactful on students and people in other situations. And technology has done so much to make the playing field more equal.

It comes into kind of like just a major conflict that for those folks to have technology in the classroom to be able to get access. It's so important, but because culturally we're coming here nowadays, I see that as one part of what's evolved that's still yet to be resolved. And I just kind of put that out there as something that I think people really need to pay attention to this 100 % against technology will be dinged for it.

Let's scale that back a little bit. There's real reasons that it's a benefit and is needed there. How do we get that to be more inclusive within a learning environment? But really what I'm interested in knowing is how does this influence traits like persistence and outcomes like retention and long-term success? When you look at that, what does the research say in that area?

Dr. Michelle Miller (09:09)
Right, and I think that here's where the literature is a bit more thin. Now we do have a lot of research going back well over a decade that links very practically students who report that they are, that they self-report being on, social media at the time.

Facebook was a big deal at the time a lot of that research was conducted, if they reported they were really involved with Facebook overall and tended to be off task with it in classrooms, what do you know? Those students had lower GPAs overall. Now, there's third factors here, which anyway doesn't invalidate the overall point. You talked about traits.

Yeah, students who are less invested to begin with. can see how it's not a confound in my mind as much so much as a potential vicious cycle. So ⁓ I'm super fixated on my social media or my online life. And I go into the class and maybe I'm less committed to the idea of school overall, or maybe I'm more ambivalent about it. And then I've got my phone out and then I...

didn't I did check out and miss some important things in class and now my GPA is kind of going down and rinse and repeat until you have a student who is really, really struggling. So recognizing that yes, practically speaking that that is a big part of it. That said, I'm not convinced and you know, folks can message me for sure, but I'm not convinced that we do have as much, you know, direct one to one of like you picked up your phone,

and then your attention somehow changed and then there was this impact on the likelihood that you earned a high GPA or persisted in school and so on. ⁓ But flipping around to a positive ⁓ angle as well, I think that having this be a package deal with the other things that we engage students in as far as becoming

you know, the students we know that they can be to connect to why are you in school? What are your goals? Okay, here's some techniques that aren't just like, ⁓ I'm this sort of grown up telling you what to do, but these are really gonna save you time and they're gonna save you grief and then school is more rewarding and you do get closer to your goals. And managing attention and distraction is one key.

you know, 21st century skill and lifelong learning skill that's just a natural part of that. We counsel students, for example, on like how, all right, what if your neighbor is the one with their laptop out and it is distracting you? What's a solution that you can think of ahead of time? And there's lots of different ways to go about that. But the key thing is, okay, think about it in advance. What would you do if this happened? ⁓ What if your

Social media is blowing up, but the big review for their organic chemistry exam is tomorrow. That's hard. How are you going to stay with that really difficult lesson? Or, my gosh, the lesson, it's dragging and I'm kind of getting a little bored and we get those itchy fingers. Well, here's some techniques. You're only human, so you're a lot better off if you're already in the habit of turning the phone off and putting it at the bottom of the backpack so you can't.

or hear it ⁓ or distract your neighbor and really monitoring what's working for you in a very honest way. Those are skills that we can apply in a lot of different areas of life that are very well suited to this and get across, I think, again, that overall big picture that contributes to academic persistence and persistence later on as well that, you you probably do own technology and the key is to own it instead of the other way around, right?

So you are in charge. You have a choice about what you let through and how you engage. Nobody promised it would be easy or that your solution is the same as everybody else's, but you gotta have a plan going in. So again, I see those as part of a package of how do we develop students who are set to achieve their dreams when they're in school and then afterwards as well.

Kelly (13:44)
Well, thank you for explaining all those those tips. And I like that the analogy of like the whole package. One more question before we wrap up here. And it's in regards to your book called The Teacher's Guide to Learning Student Names. Why you should, why it's hard and how you can. So I guess a couple of questions are in here. Yeah, obviously, you know, why is it important for you know, let's let's talk about the why and the how.

know, faculty member can do it, but then also thinking about our job seekers and our professionals, you know, working on campus. Do you have like a quick tip or, ⁓ you know, advice on how they can remember people's names and the importance?

Dr. Michelle Miller (14:23)
well.

you would, this is actually not a tangent because the quick package version of the tips and tricks, which I agree we all need, it starts with attention. So, and that's something that, I mean, there's lots of, and part of why I wrote the book, there's lots of like random tip and trick guys, and it's fine. We can hit on a little mnemonic or something, a little shortcut here or there that might work for us, but nothing that really

again, gives us an end-to-end strategy that's aligned to why our name's hard to remember in the first place, which I would encourage people to pick up the book if they want that. But the quick little system, it's A-S-A-R, and guess what the A is for? Attention. And those tip and trick guides don't get to one of the roots of the problem, which is when we are learning a name, where is our focus? We're at that conference, and we're shaking the hand. It's like, okay, I'm Michelle.

Your brain is on how am I coming across? What am I going to say? Oh, is that the buffet set up over there? I'm in a million miles away. I don't even pay attention when the name comes through. So believe me, if you just do nothing else but get in that ironclad habit of oops, there's a name, I'm attentive to the name, that's really, really helpful. And the rest of it is, yeah, attend, say.

So saying the name back, you can do it to excess, it makes sure that you're attentive, because remember, when are we attentive? When we have to respond. So if I'm in the habit of like, in two seconds, I got to say this name back.

I'm gonna get it and it also like if I got it wrong, if I'm saying it wrong, then this is still a socially acceptable time to correct me instead of like a week from now when I've been calling you the wrong thing. So attend, say it back. Sometimes little associations work but those aren't even as important and then retrieve it. So before I wrap up this conversation with my new friend Kelly, I'm gonna be sure, you know what Kelly, it was great to meet you. ⁓

retrieve it one more time. Or if I don't feel like it's acceptable for me to get away with that, at least in my head, I'm going, okay, your name was Kelly. So it starts with attention and believe me, try it and you will start to see. Attention is, if not half the battle, an enormous chunk of it.

Kelly (16:50)
I'm going to try that. And I feel like you might have talked to Andy before I asked you that question, because yes, I am the person that's looking for the buffet line. Like I have to plan out like, what am I going to eat? And I might have missed your name because I am looking at the buffet line. So I'm going to try that technique that you just said. So thank you.

Dr. Michelle Miller (17:08)
You're welcome. And doesn't it show us there's no tape? Yeah. Because that's what we do. Oh, what was her name? Why can't I remember? Because you weren't paying attention and there's nothing there.

Kelly (17:20)
Well, Michelle, this was such a fun conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. really enjoyed it. learned, I learned a lot.

Dr. Michelle Miller (17:25)
It was my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me on the podcast.

Andy (17:29)
Thanks, Michelle. And thank you for listening. We really appreciate you spending time with us and hope you found this conversation as interesting and useful as we did. If you have any questions for us, please feel free to email us at podcast at higheredjobs.com or send us a direct message on X @HigherEdCareers. We'd love to hear your thoughts, or suggested topics. Thanks again for listening and we look forward to talking again real soon.