Avoiding Eye Contact Can Improve Students’ Comprehension

There is a good reason not to be upset if students don’t look directly at you during a lesson or conversation.

While explaining a writing technique to my students, I noticed that one of them, Emily, was staring off to the side. Thinking that she was daydreaming, I wondered whether I should say her name or ask her a question to “bring her back” to the classroom.

Recently, I learned that I didn’t necessarily need to be concerned about Emily’s lack of eye contact with me. In fact, surprisingly, research suggests that other students might have benefited from doing just what Emily was doing — gazing away from me.

Saving mental energy

Although the ability to make eye contact is important, researchers have found that faces can be distracting. If we are looking at someone while they are talking to us, our brains are using energy trying to read their faces and, at the same time, concentrate on what they are saying.

Trying hard to maintain eye contact can reduce our mental bandwidth. As a result, people will occasionally look away in order to save mental energy.

Researchers recently discovered that when school children look away from their teacher, they are much more likely to think of the correct answer to a question that the teacher has asked.

In her article, “Looking Away Helps Concentration” in Live Science, Jeanne Bryner wrote that “Scientists have found that adults tend to turn their gaze away from a questioner’s face when they were asked a thought-provoking question. While adults practice this look-away about 85 percent of the time, children five years old and younger do it just 40 percent of the time.”

Study: Students trained to look away performed better.

Psychologists in Scotland wanted to find out how much “gaze aversion” (ending eye contact) affected children’s concentration. For their study, they used 20 five-year-old children from a primary school. They trained 10 of these students to look away while they were trying to think of an answer to a question. Instead of looking at the eyes of the questioner, they looked at a blank piece of paper on the floor. The other 10 students received no eye- contact training. Then, the researchers asked each student a series of math and verbal questions. The questions had a range of easy to more difficult.

They found that the students who had been trained to look away from the questioner’s face answered 72% of the questions correctly, but the untrained group were right only 55% of the time.

Also, for the difficult questions, there was an even bigger difference. The students who looked away when trying to think of the answer got 61% correct while the students who kept eye contact got only 37% right.

Don’t take it personally if your students aren’t looking at you.

The researchers suggest that teachers should not quickly scold students if they stop looking at a teacher when asked a question. Their averted eye gaze could be a sign that they are thinking and need some time.

Not only children but also adults tend to be able to concentrate better when they avert their gaze. Researchers Shogo Kajimura and Michio Naumra from the University of Kyoto conducted a study with 26 people. Their study involved a word-matching game in which the participants hear a noun and then they had to say a verb that could be logically used with the noun. For example, if they heard the noun milk, they might respond with the word drink. They also made the task more challenging by using nouns that could correspond to several verbs. For example, the noun “soup” could go with eat, drink or cook. And to make it even more challenging, they used nouns like sky.

During the experiment, participants were told to look at a screen that showed a person’s face. They were instructed to stare at the eyes of the person on the screen. At times, the person’s eyes looked directly at the participant, and sometimes their eyes looked to the side.

Not surprisingly, when it was easy to think of a verb for the noun (for example, drink for milk), they could answer the question quickly. Moreover, the eye contact with the person on the screen had NO effect on how fast they could answer the question.

However, when the verb-noun connection was more challenging (for example, soup or sky), they were much slower in their response when the eyes on the screen looked directly at them.

According to the researches of that study, eye contact made participants brains work harder during the complex tasks. They needed mental energy to think of an answer, but they also need to use some in order to maintain eye contact.

In a funny sort of way, this research has given me a new perspective when I’m giving a talk to the class. If the students are all looking directly at me, I start to wonder if what I’m saying is too simple. But if some of them start gazing off to the side, I think, “Ah, I’m giving them a good mental challenge.”