In 2017, Ryan L. Schaaf began a 12-part series on nine learning attributes of digital learners, drawing on the work of Ian Jukes, Ted McCain and Lee Crockett. This second part appears below as published. After it, a new section looks at what research since then says about the idea of a digital generation and what it means for teaching.
Part 2: The Nine Core Learning Attributes of the Digital Generations: A Primer
by Ryan L. Schaaf
Series Synopsis: Due to continuous digital bombardment and the emergence of the new digital landscape, today’s youth process information, interact, and communicate in fundamentally different ways than any previous generation before them. Meanwhile, many of us, having grown up in a relatively low-tech, stable, and predictable world, are constantly struggling with the speed of change, technological innovation, and the freedom to access the overwhelming sea of information online – all defining characteristics of the digital world of both today and the swiftly-approaching future.
Based on the award-winning book, Reinventing Learning for the Always-On Generation: Strategies and Apps That Work, this 12-part article series will provide a comprehensive profile of nine core learning attributes of digital learners, and the core teaching, learning, and assessment strategies that can be used to appeal to their digital lifestyle and learning preferences. Readers will gain a clear understanding of various research-based strategies to optimize learning for the digital generation in the new digital landscape.
“To understand the world of the digital generations, we must be willing to immerse ourselves in that world. We must embrace the new digital reality. If we can’t relate, if we don’t get it, we won’t be able to make schools relevant to the current and future needs of the digital generations.” -Ian Jukes
Neuroplasticity at Work
Digital Bombardment
Digital bombardment has transformed today’s learners into digital learners. And because of this transformation, the digital generations have developed new preferences for learning. Jukes, Schaaf, and Mohan (2015) identified nine key learning attributes of the digital generations. It’s important to note that these attributes don’t apply equally to every learner in every location. There is a wide range of behaviors that are affected by factors such as culture, socio-economics, geography and personal experience that can affect the development of these tendencies.
The Nine Learning Attributes of the Digital Generations
Attribute #2 – Digital learners prefer parallel processing and multitasking. Multitasking has become a necessary skill of modern life, but we need to acknowledge the challenges and help our students adapt accordingly.
Attribute #3 – Digital learners prefer processing pictures, sounds, color, and video before they process text. Since childhood, the digital generations have been continuously exposed to, and bombarded by television, videos, computers, tablets and video games that put colorful, high quality, highly expressive, realistic, multisensory experiences – sight, sound, and touch (and likely in the near future smell, taste, and 3D) in front of students with little or no accompanying text. As a result, to the digital generations, images and video are powerful enough on their own to communicate messages to and for them.
Attribute #4 – Digital learners prefer to network and collaborate simultaneously with many others. The emergence of global networking has shifted power and knowledge from the individual to the group. Both students and teachers have the ability to leverage the socialized realm of the new digital landscape for effective communication and collaboration with each other and the outside world.
Attribute #5– Digital readers unconsciously read text on a page or screen in an F or Fast-pattern due to their digital viewing behaviors, habits, and activities.
Attribute #6 – Digital learners prefer “just-in-time” learning. They prefer to learn a topic or skill when they must or are motivated to do so.
Attribute #7– Digital learners are looking for instant gratification and immediate rewards, as well as simultaneously looking for deferred gratification and delayed rewards. Deferred gratification and delayed rewards say that if you study hard, and if you keep focused, and if you behave and if you attend class regularly, you’ll eventually be rewarded with a good letter grade, acceptance to a good school or the chance for a good job. But on the other hand, they must also see incremental progress, growth or success.
Attribute #8– Many of the digital generations are transfluent. Their visual-spatial skills are so highly evolved that they have cultivated a complete physical interface between digital and real worlds. Because of digital bombardment, many of the digital generations have become completely comfortable using a wide range of media, and can seamlessly shift between their digital and non-digital worlds. They have completely internalized the use of digital tools, and as a result, take them for granted. For them, the Internet is a natural, transparent space, fully integrated into their lives. It does not isolate; it empowers them.
Attribute #9 – Digital learners prefer learning that is simultaneously relevant, active, instantly useful and fun. They must understand that there is a reason for learning with a sense of ownership, engagement, and wonder.
Now, for the rest of the installments in this series, readers will explore each attribute in more detail and explore some of the various tools and strategies available for educators to use with their students to align with each learning preference.
Teaching the digital generation in 2026: what research says about digital learners
Teaching the digital generation has been described as a matter of matching lessons to young people who, in the words of this series, process information, interact and learn in fundamentally different ways. As Ryan L. Schaaf explains above, the series lists nine attributes, such as a preference for quick access to hyperlinked sources, for parallel processing, for pictures before text and for just-in-time learning. Schaaf also notes that these attributes do not apply equally to every learner. This section looks at a widely cited 2017 review that tests the idea of the digital learner against research, and then at what teachers can keep from the series and what they should treat with caution.
What a 2017 review of the research concluded
Paul A. Kirschner of the Open University of the Netherlands and Pedro De Bruyckere of Artevelde University College Ghent published The myths of the digital native and the multitasker in the journal Teaching and Teacher Education in 2017. It is a review article, so it reports what other studies found and does not present new data. The authors argue that there is no such thing as a digital native who is skilled with information simply because the person has never known a world without digital media, and that the ability to multitask, which is often attached to the idea, does not exist in the way it is described.
On the first point, they cite studies from several countries in which university students born after 1984 turned out to have limited technology knowledge, often confined to office software, email, text messaging, social media and web searching. When the students used technology for study, it was mostly to take in information, such as reading Wikipedia or downloading lecture notes. The authors also cite research by Eszter Hargittai, who analyzed a national broadband survey and found that among people 50 and under there was no relationship between age and internet know-how, while higher income and education were related to more of it. Kirschner and De Bruyckere also report studies of student teachers born after 1984 in Finland, whose technology knowledge was not what the digital native idea would predict.
Multitasking is task switching
On the second point, the review explains that people can carry out two thinking tasks at once only if one of them is fully automatic. Otherwise they switch quickly between tasks, and each switch has a cost. The authors cite laboratory work from 1989 and 1994 showing that doing two tasks together is not faster than doing them one after another, and later studies of students. In one study, heavy users of social media studied as long as light users but had significantly lower grade point averages, especially students who stopped studying each time a message arrived. In another, students who multitasked on laptops during a lecture scored lower, and so did students who could see those screens.
These findings bear on Schaaf’s second attribute, that digital learners prefer parallel processing and multitasking. Schaaf adds that educators must acknowledge the challenges of multitasking, and the research suggests that the most useful response is to design lessons that protect sustained attention instead of assuming students can divide it.
What the review does and does not say
The review does not claim that technology is unimportant or that schools should stand still. Kirschner and De Bruyckere write that proposed changes to education should be informed by evidence, both in the reasons for the change and in the changes themselves, and they point to digital literacy as an important subject because students need to be taught how to deal with online information. They also suggest that diminished concentration may stem from constant task switching between devices, though they leave that topic for another article. This section takes no position on the series’ claims about how young people’s brains have changed, because the review it relies on is about digital natives and multitasking. A reader who wants to rely on any of the series’ brain-based statements should ask for the specific study behind it.
What a teacher can keep from the series
Several of the nine attributes describe sound classroom habits whether or not a generation is different. Students benefit when learning is relevant, active and useful, and when they can see small signs of progress along the way, which are Schaaf’s seventh and ninth attributes. Students and teachers alike need to tell the substance of an online source from its surface, a point Schaaf makes under the first attribute. Collaboration and the use of images and video can be good teaching without a claim that young people think differently.
A school leader can use three questions when a program says it is built for digital learners. What study supports each claim? Does the program ask students to switch between tasks, and does it protect time for focused work? And does it teach students to evaluate what they find? The UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report of 2023 adds a reminder that impartial evidence on education technology is in short supply and that much of what exists comes from those selling it. The edCircuit digital citizenship guide and its AI literacy guide address how students can be taught to judge information in practice.
Further Reading
- Huffington Post – Top 15 Insights About Neuroplasticity, Emotions and Lifelong Learning
- Ed Digital Tribe – What are the most profound effects that digital bombardment has on children?
- EdUtopia – Neuroplasticity: Learning Physically Changes the Brain
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