Mind wandering during lectures II: Relation to academic performance.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We explored whether students’ (N = 154) engagement in mind wandering (both intentional and unintentional forms) throughout a 12-week undergraduate course was related to their performance on in-class quiz questions and later course exams. Intermittently presented thought-probes sampled mind-wandering rates during lectures, and retention of lecture information was gauged by later quiz and exam performance. A number of self-report measures including overall grade-point average (GPA), motivation to learn, and overall propensity to mind wander were also collected. Among the many results of our study, we found that at the group level students’ bouts of intentional, t = 2.37, p < .05, but not unintentional, t = 1.39, p = .17, mind wandering resulted in poorer quiz scores than did periods of on-task focus. At the level of individual differences, regression and mediation analyses revealed that intentional mind wandering was most strongly linked to short-term performance costs, measured by quiz performance (intentional: β = −.23, p < .01; unintentional: β = −.16, p = .06). Conversely, unintentional mind wandering was most strongly related to longer term performance costs, measured by exam performance (intentional: β = −.01, p = .90; unintentional: β = −.14, p = .06). Interestingly, mind wandering was found to be associated with performance independently of other known determinants of performance (e.g., GPA, class attendance). Together these findings provide evidence that (a) mind wandering during university lectures is associated with significant performance costs, and (b) the nature of these costs depends on whether the mind-wandering episode was intentional or unintentional.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".