I think I recall reading something about that -- it's about an hour or less, right, the ability to maintain focus, or is it even less?
What I've read is that the average adult can give their full focused attention to any given task for between 15 minutes and a half hour, maybe 45 minutes. Go much beyond that and attention begins to wane. Most adults lose most of their focus within an hour to 90 minutes. You can generally push yourself beyond that, with diminished capacity. It benefits people greatly to do 2 things. 1) take frequent micro-breaks. Even as short as 1-2 minutes is enough to re-engage the brain. This means disconnect from the current task, don't just switch to another task. Get up, walk around, get a drink, look outside, or even maybe post something on JF. And 2) focus on one task at a time. It's been shown repeatedly that people who claim to "multitask" get significantly less done, with consistently lower quality, than those who focus on one task at a time. Multitasking is just switching between tasks, since your brain really can't engage any more than one task at a time, and without at least a few minutes to really engage you never give either task truly your full attention, so both (or multiple as the case may be) tasks suffer.
That is why standardized testing is so important. I understand the "teaching to the test" argument against it but we really need a way to judge the effectiveness of different methods and educators in a system of such importance.
See my above answer to One Brow. The innovation would be making pertinent information easily publicly available. I have a hard time believing schools don't already have data on poor performing educators and poor performing schools but guard it as much as the law allows.
