Attention is crucial for effective learning. There is an emerging research trend that suggests attention can be improved by changing the structure of the learning task, leading to increased learning. This chapter reviews and reanalyzes studies of attention in educational settings with respect to the structure of the learning task. This analysis is then integrated with theoretical accounts of mind wandering, sequential action, and monitoring. The resulting elaborated theory of mind wandering explains how a learning task structure can enhance a student's level of attention within the learning task. Furthermore, it motivates a new hypothesis which could be used to suggest ways of changing task structure to optimize learning performance via improved attention. [This is a chapter in: J. Fawcett, E. F. Risko, & A. Kingstone (Eds.), "The Handbook of Attention" (pp. 623--642). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.]