New study finds children spend a quarter of their time daydreaming in class

Does your mind wander when you're in the classroom...

Do you find yourself daydreaming a lot in class? If so, you're not alone!

A new study has found that children spend a quarter of their time in class daydreaming.

Researchers looked at a group of children aged between six and 11 years old.

They found that while it is impossible for children to avoid daydreaming or mind-wandering, it may be having a negative effect on learning.

We want to know what you think. Do you find yourself daydreaming in class? Let us know in the comments below!

What did researchers find?

A new study has found that children cannot avoid daydreaming in the classroom

Researchers from Queen's University in Belfast played a story to nearly 100 children and asked them a question every two minutes to check if they were paying attention.

In the exercise, the children reported that their mind had wandered around 25% - or a quarter - of the time.

After the story was over, the children were then asked 10 questions to see what they could remember about it, whether they had liked the story and how interested they were in it.

The results of the study, which have been published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, showed that those who daydreamed more often remembered less about the story.

It also suggested that if children are very interested in a lesson in school, they will daydream less.

Daydreaming is common in both children and adults

The study is the first of its kind to look at how daydreaming affects how well children learn and remember what they have been taught.

Researchers said that knowing more about daydreaming in children could help with finding ways to reduce it in school.

Dr Agnieszka Graham, who was involved with the study said: "In school, often children can get in trouble for mind wandering.

"However, our research has found that children, like adults, are unable to fully concentrate all the time, it's likely that their minds will wander for a substantial proportion of a typical school day."

She added that more research was needed and could help children "detect when their minds strayed from the task at hand and refocus their attention".