Speaking of Books with Ronald Yaros: Spice Up Your Students' Digital DIET: Applying a New Digital Engagement Model to Retain Attention

A common comment from many students is that they wish they could resist the temptation to check their phones during lectures, study time, and especially video or Zoom sessions. Why do so many scroll, click, and disengage so quickly—and what can educators do to foster meaningful engagement? Even well-produced news, storytelling, and educational content is ineffective when students are constantly pulled toward endless streams of competing information. If the problem is only shorter attention spans, no one would watch movies, streaming videos, or TV shows anymore.

In his new book, The Digital Engagement Model, Dr. Ronald Yaros of the College of Journalism’s Digital Engagement Lab addresses this challenge with research-driven strategies for building “attention momentum” in your content. Drawing on his interdisciplinary research in journalism and educational psychology, and informed by more than a decade of teaching one of the university’s first “Big Question” iCourses, he will explain how any content can be structured for both long-form and short-form engagement depending on students’ interests, environments, and available time. Faculty across disciplines will leave with new, practical approaches to presenting content to students who grew up in a mobile-saturated world.

Ronald Yaros is an associate professor of digital engagement at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism and director of the Digital Engagement Lab. He is an Apple Distinguished Educator, one of the first recipients of the Donna Hamilton Excellence in Teaching Award from the Office of Undergraduate Studies, and a Tow-Knight "Disruptive Educator for Journalism Innovation and Entrepreneurship." Since 2008, Yaros’ research has examined the micro-level cognitive processes people use to seek, select, and share digital information. Through student collaborations with newsrooms such as USA Today and The Baltimore Sun, his teaching has addressed a central challenge of the digital era: how to capture and sustain users’ attention. His new book, The Digital Engagement Model: How to Capture and Keep Audience Attention, details an evidence-based framework for designing content that aligns engagement with real-world constraints of diverse audiences with limited time and mobile environments. His work also appeared in three book chapters and in the journals Frontiers in Media Psychology, Communication Research, Science Communication, News Research Journal, Innovative Higher Education, and the International Journal of Cyber Behavior, Psychology and Learning. Before earning his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Yaros was a broadcast meteorologist and science reporter who produced the nation’s first award-winning news series on climate change in 1981 and later served as president of a national educational software company.