High School Attention Span

How long is a high school-age child's attention span?

It's been said that a high school child's attention span is between eight and fourteen minutes. Of course, we know that in any given class period, which is up to fifty minutes long, the child is expected to stay on task and at attention. That's because the period's broken up into different challenges for the high school children. At first they may be observing the teacher demonstrating, modeling or presenting new information in some way. Then, for the rest of the period, those students are asked to perform themselves in some way, whether that be a quiz or a practice for the test, or reproducing what the teacher has shown them. The combination of all of those different activities lead to time on task of much longer than the attention span of eight to fourteen minutes.