Short-form content, in particular emotionally charged “Doomscrolling”, has emerged as a significant challenge to digital wellbeing, particularly among higher education students driven by personalised algorithms and the fear of missing out.

Recent research in digital pedagogy and HCI has noted that self-curated social media feeds, continuous news cycles, and progressive swiping contribute to cognitive overload, stress, anxiety and shorter attention spans, reducing the capacity for deep learning. This negatively impacts students’ productivity and engagement in educational contexts, due to continuous scrolling being intentionally designed to sustain attention through infinite content feeds (Alter, 2017).

Key studies relating to social media’s impact on academic performance highlight student-reported findings on daily screen time and its effects on assignment completion. Platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram have been identified as significant digital distractions that alter the attentional process of students by activating dopamine-based reward circuits and encouraging compulsive checking behaviours (Hormes et al., 2014).

This talk will outline emerging research on scrolling, attention, and digital pedagogy while outlining practical strategies for educators and learning designers to support student wellbeing and sustained cognitive engagement in Edtech learning contexts.