What’s the Digital Age Doing to Young Brains?
Even as more schools adopt new technology to boost student learning, researchers are voicing concern about what the stream of stimuli from computers and cellphones is doing to young brains.
According to The New York Times, researchers say the risk is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.
“Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,” said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. And the effects could linger: “The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.”
Several recent studies show that young people tend to use home computers for entertainment, not learning, and that this can hurt school performance, particularly in low-income families. Jacob L. Vigdor, an economics professor at Duke University who led some of the research, said that when adults were not supervising computer use, children “are left to their own devices, and the impetus isn’t to do homework but play around.”
Research also shows that students often juggle homework and entertainment. The Kaiser Family Foundation found earlier this year that half of students from 8 to 18 are using the Internet, watching TV, or using some other form of media either “most” (31 percent) or “some” (25 percent) of the time that they are doing homework.
Filed under: K-12 Education News
Tags: Research on Learning, Technology
