The Cognitive Ecology of Learning: Attentional Fragmentation, Cognitive Malnourishment, and Cognitive Endurance in Technology-Rich Secondary Science Classrooms

Background/Objectives: Contemporary secondary students increasingly learn in technology-rich classrooms characterized by digital stimulation, multitasking demands, compressed pacing, platform switching, and persistent attentional competition. Established scholarship on cognitive load, multimedia learning, self-regulated learning, disciplinary literacy, attentional control, and environmental restoration identifies mechanisms relevant to these conditions, but these mechanisms are often examined at different levels of analysis. This conceptual review develops the Cognitive Ecology of Learning Framework (CELF) as an applied, classroom-level framework for examining how disciplinary cognitive demand, attentional fragmentation conditions, and restoration opportunities may interact during sustained secondary science learning. Methods: An integrative conceptual-review and theory-synthesis design was used. Iterative searches conducted from January through May 2026 identified theoretical, empirical, and review literature across education, psychology, attentional science, digital learning, environmental psychology, and secondary science education. Sources were selected purposively according to their relevance to the research questions and synthesized through cross-domain comparison. Results: The synthesis proposes CELF as a hypothesis-generating framework organized around three classroom-level dimensions: Disciplinary Cognitive Demand, Attentional Fragmentation Conditions, and Restoration Opportunities. The framework also proposes cognitive malnourishment and cognitive endurance as context-sensitive constructs requiring empirical validation. Cognitive malnourishment describes a possible ecological mismatch in which substantial informational or disciplinary demand coincides with persistent fragmentation and insufficient opportunities for elaboration, reflection, consolidation, and coherent reengagement. Cognitive endurance refers to the context-sensitive capacity to sustain attention, conceptual processing, and disciplinary reasoning during extended, cognitively demanding work. Preliminary indicators, measurement approaches, and testable propositions are presented for future classroom-based research. Conclusions: CELF organizes selected task-level, learner-level, disciplinary, attentional, and environmental constructs within a bounded framework for technology-rich secondary science classrooms. It does not revise or replace the foundational theories from which these constructs are drawn, nor does it claim causal validation. Instead, CELF provides a structure for investigating how classroom conditions may support or constrain attentional continuity, conceptual persistence, restoration, and sustained disciplinary engagement.