Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, Volume 26, Number 1

In their book for college students about how learning works, Terry Doyle and Todd Zakrajsek discuss the primacy of paying attention in or- der for genuine learning to occur. As they say, "With respect to learning, the one law that is absolute is that in order to learn we have to attend to what we are learning" (p. 99). And, although there are a variety of ways of paying attention, they write that learning takes more than casual inter- est. "Finally," they say, "there is effortful attention, which is often needed when you study or participate in class. . . . Essentially, as the skills or learning tasks become more difficult, you need to pay more attention in order to understand and learn the material" (pp. 101-102). In fact, Doyle and Zakrajsek tell college students that "It is crucial that you understand that you do not have the luxury in college to pay attention only to what interests you" [italics in the original] (p. 102).