SELECTIVITY AND COMMUNICATION BATTLE

Students learn what they choose to learn, not what teachers choose to teach. That means we need to figure out how to get them to choose to learn the same thing we choose to teach them. In the ‘selectivity battle’, the instructional goal will be missed if teachers fail to recognise or deal with that obstacle.

The four types of selectivity can directly interfere with initial learning:

1. Selective exposure
2. Selective attention
3. Selective perception
4. Selective retention 

The fifth type of selectivity may occur even after initial learning:

 5.   Selective Recall

Selective Exposure:

It refers to a person’s conscious or unconscious decision to place her- or himself in a position to receive messages from a particular source. The teachers need to understand the factors that lead to exposure decisions.

• Attention Span
• Novelty
• Concreteness
• Size
• Duration 

Selective Attention:

As the old saying goes, you can bring a horse to water (selective exposure), but you can’t make it drink (particular attention). Students cannot always control the type of message they are exposed to from teachers. Hence, when exposed to messages they would rather avoid, they may simply select to pay attention to something else. In a nutshell, all attention is selective. Everything that is happening in the classroom demands their attention, and from which they select to whom they give more or less importance. Many factors determine what the student will pay attention to:

• Proximity
• Involvement
• Utility
• Reinforcement 

Selective Perception

Perception is the process of ascribing meaning to messages. Messages don’t carry the meaning; they stimulate the meaning. What meaning is stimulated is the function of both the message and the receiver. Thus all perception is selective. Hence, different receivers receive the same message but perceive different meanings- according to their assigning of possible meaning. Several factors cause misperceptions:

• Attention Span
• Novelty
• Concreteness
• Size
• Duration 

Selective Retention

It may be the problem that frustrates teachers the most. Students are present, they pay attention, and through interaction with them, we know they perceive what they were taught. But a few days (or sometimes minutes!) later, they seem never to have heard of the ideas before.

Selective retention refers to storing or not storing information in long-term memory. Several factors are known to influence selective retention:

• Ambiguity of Messages
• Lack of Redundancy
• Lack of Schema
• Previous Experiences
• Expectancies and Biases

Selective Recall

Selective retention and selective recall are often confused and sometimes thought to be the same. In fact, they are quite different, though related. Selective retention is about information storage, while selective recall involves information retrieval. If information is not stored (retained) in the first place, it cannot be retrieved (recalled) later. However, the fact that something is retained does not necessarily mean it will be recalled at any given time.