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Your Brain on Computers –
Perhaps Not What You Think!
I have seen this New York Times article posted in several places. It warns us that our use of technology—computers, video games, I-Pads, I-Pods, smart phones, the internet, Facebook—may be rewiring our brains and making us into a bunch of multi-taskers with no ability to focus.
It's good to question modern lifestyles (it's good to question everything!), and advice to seek balance and moderation is always win-win. However, I still felt a bit restive with the somewhat dire tone of the article's warning. I have noticed the changes in my own life before and after internet, before and after cell phones, before and after computers: there are some problems to watch out for, sure, but most of the effects of these technologies have been great!
That's why I'm so grateful for the perspective given by Jonah Lehrer in his post “Tradeoffs.” He points out that a group of University of Michigan scientists identified walking down a city street as having a much MORE dramatic bad effect on working memory, self-control, visual attention and positive affect than does multi-tasking on the internet with a computer.
Where, oh where are the articles warning “This is your brain on a walk”?
The University of Michigan study concludes that time spent in nature can be restorative, leading to “improvements in directed-attention abilities.” It carefully explains that a walk in nature is usually filled with things to see, smell, feel, and hear, but these stimuli only modestly grab our attention in a bottom-up way. The city walk, on the other hand, is filled with sights, sounds and smells that dramatically vie for attention and that require top-down thinking—directed attention—to stay safe from traffic and to deal with the confusing urban grid.
The study doesn't seem to deal with all the in-between situations that describe the bulk of my life: the city walks that feature little or no traffic, no jostling crowds, and are very, very familiar. I find myself not thinking too much about the here-and-now on many of my city walks, and since I am walking a well-known course, I certainly don't think for a moment about where I am or where I am going. Instead, I can concentrate on a good conversation, watch the sun set, or enjoy the chirping of birds. Another situation that seems to be in-between is walking in nature on full alert. When we've just spotted fresh bear scat, and there were reports about a bear getting into a camper's food supply the night before, I am definitely directing my attention to every little sight and sound!
The main point of the study—the restorative qualities of being in nature—is one I can fully embrace. But only because the scientists didn't warn us to avoid cities. As Lehrer points out, “we also know that cities are enormously valuable.” All the stimulation and interaction provided by an urban setting can benefit us, although we can and should still take time out for nature.
Likewise, the internet provides incredible benefits, and (Lehrer writes) “the value it provides far outweighs the cognitive costs (which may or may not exist.)”
Yes, let's study brain function as we use new technologies. Yes, let's continue to avail ourselves of old technologies—like boardgames and jump ropes and paperback books—even as we invent the latest great thing. Yes, let's live by balance and moderation in all things, including moderation itself. Yes, let's keep questioning our choices and our values, and let's keep up the society-wide conversation about all these issues.
But let's do this, too: let's keep our conclusions in proportion to our data.
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Skipping Grades
One thing that unschoolers* get right is not buying into the myth that “grade level” has some inherent meaning.
We can arbitrarily assign a grade level to a student, of course, in the sense of “first year of schooling / homeschooling / unschooling,” “second year,” and so forth—but somehow this simple label has taken on so much extra weight:
- Children's reading ability is often expressed by “grade level” (supposedly measured to the year and month), and people worry if a child is reading “below” grade level, when we should be concerned about other aspects of reading and learning to read.
- Children's curricula are often organized according to traditional “grade level” assignments, and people tend to plop kids into materials and subjects that they simply aren't ready for or interested in because of the grade-level label.
- Children are assumed to learn better with children who share the number labels of age and “grade level,” rather than in groups with shared interests and similar abilities, and rather than taking advantage of multi-level classrooms in which older children can teach younger children.
Learning to Read in Lockstep with our Peers
Babies don't learn to walk and talk at the same age. Toddlers don't achieve toilet training at the same age. Is it realistic to expect all children to learn to read at the same age?
The long-term results sought by parents and educators should be young adults who can read critically and who enjoy reading for entertainment and education. Although awareness of problems along a child's way to this goal of course is helpful to alleviating those problems, it is not necessary or even helpful to constantly compare children to one another or to some arbitrary idea of exactly what “level” they have achieved at any given moment in their school career.
Rather than worrying about reading “level,” we should be asking questions such as, does the child feel that he is being welcomed into the reading “club”? Does she enjoy reading? Why is he or she reading?
Some schools hold to rigid curricula based on imparting knowledge largely through reading and measuring knowledge largely through written tests, and late readers in such schools often fall farther and farther behind. Education professor Laura Justice worries because one-third of all fourth graders in the U.S. “lack basic reading skills,” with a much higher percentage of poor children facing this lack. She posits that early intervention is necessary because these kids can never catch up.
However, homeschoolers, particularly unschoolers, are a giant experiment in allowing children to learn to read with their own timetable, as children learn to talk and walk and so many other important things in their own time. Although I was unable to find a scientific study about the topic, every single one of the many, many homeschooled children I know or have read about have successfully learned to read, although at ages ranging from three to eleven, and the late bloomers have in every case successfully “caught up” in reading ability to the early readers.
(I am certain that there are some homeschoolers with disabilities who run into reading problems that aren't just “late blooming,” but I don't personally know any. The “every single one” I do know includes kids who have been diagnosed with dyslexia, which has impacted the kids' ability to spell more than to read.)
The success of homeschoolers allowing children to learn to read at their own pace depends, of course, on the ability to individualize learning and teach one-on-one. Most homeschool parents read aloud to their children, and this practice can (and should) go on for years, even after children have started to read on their own. Because of all this reading aloud, children who are late bloomers still enjoy and learn from books and literature.
New research backs up the idea that later readers aren't at a disadvantage: University of Otago researcher Dr. Sebastian Suggate has shown that children who begin to learn to read at age seven soon catch up to children who begin to learn to read at age five. Other studies have shown that many reading difficulties can crop up when reading is taught before a child is ready, so an earlier start date in school is a bad idea. Finally, education critics point out that developing lifelong readers is very different from just teaching a child to read; despite all the emphasis in school on the three R's, research shows that 20 million people in the U.S. can't read, another 40 million cannot read well enough to keep up with current events through reading, but far more prevalent are the millions and millions of adults who can read but don't read.
Measuring Reading Grade Level
Of course, if we allow our children to learn to read at their own pace, that will make a mockery of the so-called grade-level measurements on their reading ability, but those measurements are questionable in any case. The precision with which “reading grade level” is reported belies the methodology of the measurement.
A reading evaluation that is actually useful is having a child read material silently and then discussing it with him or her. Of course, this evaluation is a bit harder to achieve in mass factory-schooling situations, and a lot harder score with a number—but I've been a classroom teacher and a parent, and I know that teachers and parents can develop a pretty good sense of how well kids are understanding what they read.
Besides, firm numbers are really good for comparing kids. But comparing kids is really bad for nurturing true learning.
Graded Curricula
Homeschoolers are lucky in that they can easily follow kids' interests rather than rigid curricula, and I understand that interest-based learning is harder to achieve in large classrooms. Still, schools can and should move away from rigid graded curricula by looking to preschool and university models. In preschool, lots of materials and activities are strewn about, available to children, and kids enjoy free time to choose among them. At other times during the preschool day, the kids are all gathered together for group activities. Few preschools spend time on "evaluation," instead, emphasis is on exposure, exposure, exposure... In universities, courses and seminars have prerequisites but (usually) not grade labels. It makes sense to ask kids to take Elementary Algebra before taking Advanced Algebra, but it doesn't make sense to ask all kids of a particular age to take Elementary Algebra. (As a private tutor, I have worked with kids who don't truly understand fractions, percents, or even multiplication and division, and they have been placed willy-nilly into Algebra classes!)
Must Classmates Be Agemates?
Parade magazine recently ran a report called “The End of Grade Levels?” Elementary and middle-school students in a Colorado school district will not be assigned to grade levels based on age, but will instead fall into multi-age levels based on what they already know. They will move up as they master new material.
According to the article, education experts say that this system works better with how children actually learn, and the system has already been proven a success in Alaska. However, the article states, many administrators and district personnel in other cities and states are afraid to try this “radical” “new” idea.
To them, I say:
(1) It's not radical. Multi-age groups are more common than not. Again, look at many preschools and universities. Look at families and clubs and scout troops.
(2) It's not new. In the small schools of the past, multi-age classes were common (think of the one-room schoolhouse).
(3) It's not necessarily going to unpopular with parents (as apparently many educators worry). The poll that accompanies the Parade article reports that 77% of all people think that ending grade levels (or adopting multi-age levels) is a good idea.
(4) Even if some parents are nervous to try a new educational practice, surely it is the job of educators to educate parents, tell them it is the better choice for learning, and explain why.
I have seen many, many good ideas pop up in education, only to fade away (or be stomped down by the system). But any one school or district can use ideas that work and make good choices for its students!
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*Unschoolers are those homeschoolers who do not generally use the methods or materials of schools.
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This Just In: TV Doesn't Rot Brains!
For several decades, experts on parenting urged us to limit our children's television viewing. Many criticisms have been leveled at that most ubiquitous source of information and entertainment: TV is supposed to lead to unhealthy, under-exercised, materialistic children hooked on eating the sugariest cereals and the sloppiest (AKA juiciest) burgers, hooked on owning the latest toys and electronics gear, hooked on passive reception rather than active participation.
No doubt about it, TV can lead to or at least exacerbate an unhealthy lifestyle or a materialistic worldview. But a lot of other things can, too. And, let's face it, many people of all ages manage to enjoy TV and still stay physically active... many manage to tune out the commercials and hold onto their own values.
Another charge levied at television is that it rots our (or at least our children's) brains.
For years, this idea seemed to be backed up by scientific studies. As Misty Harris of Canwest News Service points out, the negative link between TV viewing and performance on cognitive tests has been shown many times over. However, a new research study proves, once again, that correlation does not necessarily mean causation.
Harris reports that the new study looked at more than 3,000 children between ages five to ten. Co-authors Abdul Munasib and Samrat Bhattacharya took into consideration parental ambition, family structure, and household income, as well as television viewing. When adjusted for these factors, the correlation between TV viewing and test scores vanished. Munasib and Bhattacharya conclude that it is parenting, not TV, that negatively or positively affects children's scores.
BBM Canada and A.C. Nielsen Company track children's viewing; recent statistics state that North American kids ages two to eleven average about three hours of TV per day. Many pediatricians, education experts, and other adults point out that, even if the viewing itself isn't harmful, they are concerned about what the kids AREN'T doing, that they COULD be doing, instead. That is a good point—although a lot of kids probably multi-task during some of those hours. (Whether or not multi-tasking is a good thing is an entirely new discussion topic!)
Some families who strictly limit TV time manage to churn out adults who watch enormous amounts of television (perhaps, in some cases, in a kind of backlash against the strict rules of their childhood), and some families who have no limits on television viewing manage to churn out active, involved adults. Clearly, as in so many things, there are no easy answers—and no substitute for good parenting.
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Sleep, Baby, Sleep
Many parents worry about getting their infants to “sleep through the night,” probably genuinely worried about the child's well-being along with their own good night's sleep. People reason that they want to train their children to sleep at night and wake in the day, rather than allow them to mix up the two. Some people even worry about “spoiling” their babies!
One tool used by some parents to achieve this goal is letting their babies “cry it out.” I know that, when I was a young parent, I was advised to let my babies cry. “It works!” I was told. If I answered my baby's cries, I was warned, I would be “training” her to cry MORE at night.
Another school of thought has always been that we should answer our infants' cries and at least attempt to soothe them. Attachment parenting, breast feeding “on demand,” the family bed—all these time-honored and widely-used (by which I mean world-wide) practices are touted as being better for baby and parents. (This is the route I took.)
A new study has been released that claims one of the two viewpoints as clearly better for baby. According to Penelope Leach, babies should not be allowed to cry themselves to sleep, because high levels of the stress hormone cortisol develops in infants when nobody answers their cries. When babies are left alone to cry repeatedly, over long periods of time, Leach says, the cortisol can become toxic to their brains.
There are times when babies cannot be soothed. This seems to be particularly true of “colicky” babies. I was lucky enough not to have this problem very often—there were only a handful of times parenting my three daughters when teething pain (or something) made them inconsolable. However, my understanding of Leach's writing is that a baby crying while being held, sang to, and soothed is much better off than a baby crying alone, unanswered, and learning that she or he will not be answered.
Still, it is incredibly stressful for the parents to hold a screaming baby. I remember the advice given by John Holt, education reformer and writer: he suggested that, if a baby's fed, burped, clean and dry, but is still crying, the tending parents could wear earplugs so that she or he can hold the baby with a calmer demeanor, which is inevitably better for both parent and child.
Value of Sleep to Memory
Jonah Lehrer and Ed Yong report that dreaming (REM sleep) is very important to the process of storing long-term memory. Apparently we replay our memories as we sleep, which reinforces them. However, as you know, dreams are always different from real life—and odder. Speculation among scientists is that the weird vibe of our dreams may be from our attempts to make new connections between various events and knowledge.
Erin Wamsley from Harvard Medical School did a study in which 99 volunteers worked with a complicated visual maze. They learned to reach a specific landmark after being dropped into the maze in a random spot. Five hours later, the volunteers were retested. Generally speaking, the volunteers did better in the retest, but those who stayed awake tested on average only 28 seconds better. The volunteers who took a 90-minute nap averaged 188 seconds better! And those volunteers who reported that they had dreamed about the maze did better than average.
These results speak to the contrasts between school systems I explored in my last post. I reported that students in Finland score highest in the world in most subjects although they attend school fewer years, days, and hours than other students, and have less homework. South Korean students score well, too (and best the Finns some years, in one or two subjects), but they have much more stressful lifestyles. One study showed that South Korean students average one hour less sleep than their American counterparts. I assume that Finnish students, with their more relaxed schedules, get plenty of sleep.
It seems to me that Wamsley's research findings show one reason why Finland's more relaxed system works so well: although we know that we can learn by consciously practicing, rehearsing, and self-testing (and South Korean students get good results with lots of extra studying), we are now finding that we learn even better when we give our brains time off to sort through concepts and events—and we give our brains time off by sleeping.
By the way, Yong reported on two similar research studies that showed that creative problem solving improved if subjects had a chance to “sleep on it.” Non-REM sleep didn't help too much, he reported; it was REM sleep (dreaming) that helped subjects draw connections between ideas and leap to a novel solution.
What to Do
It's clear that parents should pick up, sing to, or otherwise try to soothe a crying baby. It seems that a stressed-out older child who is trying to cram before a test or solve a complex math problem may need the same soothing message: Sleep, baby, sleep.
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Finnish Education in the News
Recently I read two different articles—and watched some video clips—about the high test scores of Finland's students, including their math and science scores. Apparently, the people at the Wall Street Journal and at the BBC are wondering why the Finns score so high.
The counter-intuitive findings include the fact that Finns start school later than do most countries' students. Kids in Finland don't start school until age 7, and much of the rest of the developed world starts students off at age 6, 5, or even earlier. (A majority of American kids, around 64%, go to pre-school by age 4. And many pre-school programs are more like "real" school than U.S. kindergarten programs were ten years ago, let alone 40 years ago. That means that most American kids go to school at least 3 years before Finnish kids.)
After starting late, Finnish schools also have the fewest class hours in the developed world. They assign less homework than schools in most countries, and they have far less standardized testing.
And wait, there's more:
Schools in Finland are more informal and relaxed than schools elsewhere, with kids walking around in their stocking feet, addressing teachers by first name, and even occasionally being allowed to sleep in class. Primary and secondary school levels are combined so that students don't change schools at ages 11 and again at 13, and they don't even change teachers often—the teacher interviewed had had her students for five years.
Perhaps most important, schools in Finland are based on a collaborative model that has little or no competition. Children are not separated by talent, and kids who have conquered topics are encouraged to help those who are struggling. (With multiple teachers in the classroom, kids who struggle also get extra help from teachers.) In Finnish schools, no child IS left behind.
All of this makes the Finnish public schools sound more like American homeschools than American public schools. Fewer hours, more informality, stronger relationships with fewer adults (one teacher even said she was like her students' "school mother"), more sharing and caring, less competition.
And Finland's students are at the top of world rankings.
One of the headlines claimed "Less is more." But of course, that depends on less what! As we have seen in various research studies, creativity flourishes in environments with collaboration, and wilts with competition, learning occurs more deeply when there is opportunity to teach as well, and is stifled by constant evaluation through standardized testing. The Finns have arranged their society and education system to have less of the negatives—but also more of the positives.
Other benefits of Finnish schools emphasized in the articles and videos are trust and independence. The school directors and teachers feel that their society values and trusts them. They aren't beholden to politicians, and they don't have to prove themselves constantly to non-educators.
Again, this is more like American homeschools than American public schools. I would also point out that Finnish teachers apparently trust their students and their students' parents more than most teachers in the U.S. trust theirs—which demonstrates once again that trust engenders trust in a two-way-street or even in a pay-it-forward phenomenon.
South Korean Schools in the News
Another, very different, sort of school system that made the news recently is the South Korean schools. Apparently, when President Obama visited the country in November, he had high praise for the nation's high-scoring students.
Yet both government officials and parents interviewed on the BBC program said that they were surprised by the praise, because in their minds, there is a problem with South Korean schools. The students are so highly stressed by academics, after school academic tutoring and classes, a lot of additional homework, and little sleep. All of it is high stakes as the students struggle to get into the best universities and therefore the best careers. Literally, the rest of their lives rest on their exhausted young shoulders. There seems to be some concern that the kids will max out on all this study—that maybe, eventually, there will be a kabloo-ey moment.
Of even more concern, apparently, is that most of the work and effort is going into mere memorization of information. Some South Koreans worry that students are not being challenged with higher-level thinking, creative problem-solving, and real-world critical thinking skills. These students may not be the innovators, the shapers of tomorrow. Some worry that all that work, and no play...will be for nothing.
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