Design and Evaluation of a School-based Sustained Attention Training Program with Parental Involvement for Preschoolers in Rural China

ABSTRACT

Research Findings: Sustained attention is a fundamental cognitive function for young children’s development. We investigated the effects of school-based audiovisual game training with parental involvement on sustained attention (SA) in 5–6-year-old Chinese children. Totally 75 children and their parents participated and were assigned into three groups. The School Practice Intervention (SPI) group and the Parental Involvement Intervention (PII) group underwent an eight-week audiovisual game training, while the No Intervention (NI) group participated in regular activities and received no intervention. We tested participants’ visual and auditory sustained attention at four time points, i.e., pretest, middle test, posttest, and follow-up test. Results indicated that (1) children in PII and SPI groups had significantly greater visual and auditory sustained attention than the NI group in posttest and follow-up test; (2) the PII group showed better SA than the SPI group in posttest and follow-up test; (3) visual SA of experimental groups improved significantly since the middle test, while the improvement of auditory SA emerged since posttest. Practice or Policy: The play-based audiovisual training in a school setting effectively enhances SA for 5–6-year-olds, and parental involvement benefits the intervention. More efforts should be made to improve auditory sustained attention. The educational implications of these findings were discussed.

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to all the students and their parents in the participating preschool. We have no conflicts of interest to disclose. We confirm that appropriate consideration has been made to protect intellectual property rights related to this work. There are no known obstacles to this publication in terms of intellectual property rights and publication time. Nevertheless, we confirm that any experimental work involving animals or human patients in this manuscript is conducted under ethical approval from all relevant institutions.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Data availability statement

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the general project of the National Social Science Fund of China under Grant [BHA210133].