To establish a novel measure of attention focus in a variety of realworld environments, I conducted real-time sampling of distractibility, mindwandering and mood across a wide range of everyday environments and activities, e.g. This thesis examines whether laboratory measures of attention focus in the face of taskirrelevant distraction can predict or reduce real-world experiences of distraction henceforth ‘attention lapses’ (covering both external, and internal sources such as mindwandering), with a specific consideration of educational environments, the adolescence period, and relationships to mood.
Overall, the results of both studies suggest that comprehensive assessment of attention skills should include both ACL and objective measures of selective attention. This time, only those two tests (Auditory Attention and Visual Attention) that had shown relatively poor discrimination between the high and low attention groups in Study I were, again, administered to another cohort of 97 Grade 4 children, as it was our intention to further challenge the reliability of the ACL. These findings were replicated in Study II, which was conducted to test further the construct validity and predictive validity of the ACL. Examining the differences in performance on attention tests, the 'low attention' children as rated by the teachers on the ACL scored lower than the 'high attention' children on the objective tests of attention. The results of factor analysis showed that a single factor labelled 'inattention' underlies the 12 items in the ACL.
The second objective was to investigate the predictive validity of the ACL by examining the relationship between the scores obtained for the participants from teachers' ratings using the ACL and the scores obtained by participants in the lab-type attention tests. In Study I, the first objective was to investigate the construct validity and the inter-rater reliability of the Attention Checklist (ACL) by factor analysing the teacher ratings of 110 Grade 4 children, obtained by using the ACL. The paper provides (1) a teacher-administered rating instrument for inattention without confounding the rating with hyperactivity and conduct disorder, and (2) evidence that the ratings correlate with the scores obtained from cognitive tests of attention.
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