Strategies for Maintaining Attention, Focus, and Concentration

Students with slow processing speed and attention-related concerns can have trouble staying focused. As a result, your client may benefit from strategies to support their concentration/focus.

Attention, Focus, and Concentration Strategies

If your client is diagnosed with ADHD you may want to suggest strategies for maintaining attention, focus, and concentration, such as:

  • Break complex tasks into manageable chunks. Give short breaks after each subtask.
  • Minimize demands on working memory. For example, provide steps and goals or timelines for completion, and highlight and review important directions.
  •  Help the client break down the steps of an assignment or activity.
  • Your client may benefit from having notes about a topic prior to class instruction (e.g., an outline). This may help to focus her/his attention on specific information as he tries to listen and help improve her/his attention/concentration
  • Provide your client with attention and praise when he/she is on task. This may help her/him sustain attention.
  • Students with attentional challenges may have difficulty following directions with many steps. Instructions should be short, specific, direct and multimodal (visual/auditory). To ensure understanding, client can be asked to rephrase directions in her/his own words.
  • Make sure you have client’s attention before giving important instructions.
  • Your client may benefit from having short movement breaks. Providing students with opportunities to physically move can help them to release excess energy and re-energize their ability to focus.
    • When possible, the movement breaks should be as authentic as possible.
    • Examples include taking a short break to get a drink of water, going to an area of the classroom where students can move around without distracting others or using a fidget tool such as a squeeze ball.
    • Observing when your client’s ability to focus begins to wane will help determine the optimal time for a break.
  • Schedule activities in a way that maximizes your client’s attention by alternating tasks that require a lot of attention with other activities and breaks. For example, scheduling a drawing activity after your client completes a math activity.
  • Use high-interest activities and hands-on demonstrations to help increase your client’s attention. Increasing the novelty and interest level of tasks increases attention, and improves the overall performance of students with attentional difficulties.
  • Teaching students self-monitoring skills has been shown to improve attention.
    • Self-monitoring involves checking over a task that is in progress, assessing progress and making adjustments as necessary.
    • It also involves reviewing a task after it has been completed and making sure that it was done correctly.
    • Such instruction can be facilitated by providing students with a list of questions to run through when starting a new assignment, such as: “What is the problem?” “What is my plan?” “Am I following my plan?” and “How did I do?” (e.g., being mindful of what the task is, how she is approaching the task and the outcome of her effort).
  • Encourage your client  to think out loud. Self-talk promotes reflection and greater awareness of one’s learning and performance. Model this behaviour by talking through your own checklists, reviewing and revising plans and discussing how to avoid errors.
  • Teach your client to slow down and systematically and carefully look at materials before responding (e.g., look at all the options before choosing an answer, highlighting important words, information and steps in questions, count to 10 before responding).
  • Teach your client how to use verbal self-commands (e.g., “Okay, calm down and think about the question.”) to help increase him focus and avoid careless mistakes.
  • Teach your client to check his/her work using calculators, spell checkers, and other helpful items.
  • Reduce the length of assignments to emphasize quality over quantity of work.
  • Break tasks up into smaller, more manageable tasks so that it aligns with your client’s attention level and abilities. Gradually increase expectations as your client demonstrates that he/she is able to maintain his/her focus for increasing amounts of time.
  • Externalize the planning process when possible (using visual guides, technology, etc.).