What does that number really mean?

Modified on Tue, 14 Aug, 2018 at 4:22 PM

One of the most frequent questions parents ask about the empirical side of the Play Attention program involves the attention percentage, and what that number actually means.

Okay, so let's say your child's attention percentage in a particular game on a particular day was, say, 67%… What this means is that 67% of the time they spent playing that particular game, they were paying attention to the absolute best of their ability. It’s what we call maximum focus or optimal concentration. Now, does that mean the other 33% of the time they were daydreaming? No, it just means that the rest of the time they were in an attentive state that was less than their absolute best.

I want to be very clear about what this number is; and perhaps even more importantly, what this number isn’t. It’s not the amount of time the student was focused; it’s the amount of time they were at maximum focus. And those are two different things.

I guarantee there will be days when your child looks at you and says, “Hey! I’m not sure Play Attention is working today because I am focused, and the character isn’t swimming to the bottom like I want it to.”

Well, they may be relatively focused, or—far more likely in the early stages—they may merely perceive themselves as focused. But in either case, they’re not focused to the absolute best of their ability. And the reason I can make a statement like that is because what we’re talking about here is a skill.

The ability to attain and sustain a maximum focus state is a skill that takes weeks and weeks of training to acquire, so no one on Earth could just sit down and do it from day one… any more than someone could just sit down and play the violin without training, or do karate on their first day. It is going to take time to develop proficiency. But the good news is that with the cognitive skills taught in Play Attention, once the student has mastered them, they have those skills for the rest of their lives because they use them all the time.

This is a permanent solution, not just a temporary fix.

With that in mind, the target number for this statistic is 75% attention or higher consistently.