E-mail post from SLIS -- Classroom Learning Analysis

Is technology producing a decline in critical thinking and analysis?

Studies shed light on multi-tasking, video games and learning

By Stuart Wolpert

| 1/27/2009

http://www.newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/is-technology-producing-a-decline-79127.aspx

As technology has played a bigger role in our lives, our skills in critical thinking and analysis have declined, while our visual skills have improved, according to research by Patricia Greenfield, UCLA distinguished professor of psychology and director of the Children's Digital Media Center, Los Angeles.

Learners have changed as a result of their exposure to technology, says Greenfield, who analyzed more than 50 studies on learning and technology, including research on multi-tasking and the use of computers, the Internet and video games. Her research was published this month in the journal Science.

Reading for pleasure, which has declined among young people in recent decades, enhances thinking and engages the imagination in a way that visual media such as video games and television do not, Greenfield said.

How much should schools use new media, versus older techniques such as reading and classroom discussion?

"No one medium is good for everything," Greenfield said. "If we want to develop a variety of skills, we need a balanced media diet. Each medium has costs and benefits in terms of what skills each develops."

Schools should make more effort to test students using visual media, she said, by asking them to prepare PowerPoint presentations, for example.

"As students spend more time with visual media and less time with print, evaluation methods that include visual media will give a better picture of what they actually know," said Greenfield, who has been using films in her classes since the 1970s.

"By using more visual media, students will process information better," she said. "However, most visual media are real-time media that do not allow time for reflection, analysis or imagination — those do not get developed by real-time media such as television or video games. Technology is not a panacea in education, because of the skills that are being lost.

"Studies show that reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary," Greenfield said. "Reading for pleasure is the key to developing these skills. Students today have more visual literacy and less print literacy. Many students do not read for pleasure and have not for decades."

Parents should encourage their children to read and should read to their young children, she said.

Among the studies Greenfield analyzed was a classroom study showing that students who were given access to the Internet during class and were encouraged to use it during lectures did not process what the speaker said as well as students who did not have Internet access. When students were tested after class lectures, those who did not have Internet access performed better than those who did.

"Wiring classrooms for Internet access does not enhance learning," Greenfield said.

Another study Greenfield analyzed found that college students who watched "CNN Headline News" with just the news anchor on screen and without the "news crawl" across the bottom of the screen remembered significantly more facts from the televised broadcast than those who watched it with the distraction of the crawling text and with additional stock market and weather information on the screen.

These and other studies show that multi-tasking "prevents people from getting a deeper understanding of information," Greenfield said.

Yet, for certain tasks, divided attention is important, she added.

"If you're a pilot, you need to be able to monitor multiple instruments at the same time. If you're a cab driver, you need to pay attention to multiple events at the same time. If you're in the military, you need to multi-task too," she said. "On the other hand, if you're trying to solve a complex problem, you need sustained concentration. If you are doing a task that requires deep and sustained thought, multi-tasking is detrimental."

Do video games strengthen skill in multi-tasking?

New Zealand researcher Paul Kearney measured multi-tasking and found that people who played a realistic video game before engaging in a military computer simulation showed a significant improvement in their ability to multi-task, compared with people in a control group who did not play the video game. In the simulation, the player operates a weapons console, locates targets and reacts quickly to events.

Greenfield wonders, however, whether the tasks in the simulation could have been performed better if done alone.

More than 85 percent of video games contain violence, one study found, and multiple studies of violent media games have shown that they can produce many negative effects, including aggressive behavior and desensitization to real-life violence, Greenfield said in summarizing the findings.

In another study, video game skills were a better predictor of surgeons' success in performing laparoscopic surgery than actual laparoscopic surgery experience. In laparoscopic surgery, a surgeon makes a small incision in a patient and inserts a viewing tube with a small camera. The surgeon examines internal organs on a video monitor connected to the tube and can use the viewing tube to guide the surgery.

"Video game skill predicted laparoscopic surgery skills," Greenfield said. "The best video game players made 47 percent fewer errors and performed 39 percent faster in laparoscopic tasks than the worst video game players."

Visual intelligence has been rising globally for 50 years, Greenfield said. In 1942, people's visual performance, as measured by a visual intelligence test known as Raven's Progressive Matrices, went steadily down with age and declined substantially from age 25 to 65. By 1992, there was a much less significant age-related disparity in visual intelligence, Greenfield said.

"In a 1992 study, visual IQ stayed almost flat from age 25 to 65," she said.

Greenfield believes much of this change is related to our increased use of technology, as well as other factors, including increased levels of formal education, improved nutrition, smaller families and increased societal complexity.

The Children's Digital Media Center, Los Angeles, has received federal funding from the National Science Foundation.

UCLA is California's largest university, with an enrollment of nearly 38,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The UCLA College of Letters and Science and the university's 11 professional schools feature renowned faculty and offer more than 323 degree programs and majors. UCLA is a national and international leader in the breadth and quality of its academic, research, health care, cultural, continuing education and athletic programs. Four alumni and five faculty have been awarded the Nobel Prize.

MEDIA LITERACY CLEARINGHOUSE
Resources for K-12 Educators

16 Life Notes (inspiration Floyd Doug Martin)

These reminiscences were spurred by the writing of Doug Martin. They are 16 items recalled from your memories of growing up. Here are Doug's first and then mine:
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12/28/08 10:02:07 PM

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Subject: My Sixteen Things (listed by Floyd Doug Martin)

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 16 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 16 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you.


1. My mother's grandfather was a Cherokee herb doctor and my mother always wanted me to go into medicine of some sort.

2. My earliest clear memory is of a neighbor's parrot in its cage screaming at me when I was four.

3. I had mumps twice, the second time was on my 9th birthday so I didn't get to go to the zoo.

4. My mother did not mind that I caught and kept snakes as a kid but she only knew of the six cages in the garage and did not know of the more than 20 cages I had in the crawl space under the house.

5. I was on the UT campus when Charles Whitman shot all those people; he shot at me but missed because I started running as soon as I saw the rifle.

6. Whenever I go anywhere the two things that I check out first are any bodies of water in the area (looking for fish) and, if my host has a garden, I look to see what they are growing.

7. Mary and I have been married 39 years and I am still glad she said yes.

8. When I was 5 my dad showed me a rough green snake crawling through the bushes and I spent about an hour following that snake around.

9. I was born down in the Chocktaw Nation in Mc Curtain County, Oklahoma, which is fitting since my grandmother was part Chocktaw and my father spoke Choctaw.

10. When I was 6 we drove to California to visit my aunt and I got to see the Grand Canyon, Carlsbad Caverns, the Petrified Forest, the Painted Desert, Lassen National Park and Yosemite National Park all on this one trip.

11. On the California trip I saw TV for the first time; the program that I remember seeing was "Space Patrol".

12. Mary and I lived for three years in Puerto Rico; I loved it and she hated it.

13. When I was in high school I was 6' 2" tall and weighed 140 lbs.; the
Chicano kids all called me "Flaco".

14. If I was going to go anyplace in the world for a week or two vacation I would probably pick Belize or the Yucatan.

15. If I was going to go anyplace in the world for an extended trip it would include New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, Fiji, Japan and Scotland and Ireland (but the last two only if I could be there in summer).

16. I hate cloudy, dreary winters so bad. That is the biggest reason that I am really glad because I no longer work for the University of Maryland.

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Tuesday, December 30, 2008


My Sixteen Things (listed by Rudolph Nicholas Nyhoff)

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 16 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 16 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you.


1. I was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on November 18, 1956, the first child of Virginia Rose Vertucci, a young charge nurse at Bridgeport Hospital, and Rudolph Nyhoff, a young intern from Holland. They had married around 9 months prior to my arrival in late February.

2. My father, an only child, was born in The Hague, Netherlands in 1928 and was raised, essentially, by his mother.

3. My mother, one of four children (2 girls/2 boys), was raised by a single mom, my New Nanny (Dad’s Dutch mother was Old Nanny), who, married at 16, had all her children by age 20, in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

4. I was born with amblyopia (aka, lazy eye) and wore a patch and then glasses as a young boy. I had surgery which shortened the muscle on my left eye and went on to become the only member of my family not to where glasses growing up. That lasted till middle age and presbyopia set in resulting in the acquisition of countless reading glasses increasing in strength until I was fitted with transition bifocals (too young for obvious split levels).

5. I spent two years in Holland and began to speak the language as my father finished up his medical training. Developed a love of raw herring and got my ankle chewed up in my Dad’s bike when my right leg got caught in the spokes. Have no recollection but I do still have the scar. My dad was horrified by the accident.

6. My earliest clear memory is the ice cream truck sounding its bell at the apartments we lived in just outside Wilmington, Delaware, where my father was doing his residency in internal medicine at Memorial Hospital (now the location of Park Place Condominiums).

7. My only brother, Doug, and I would play war games in Brandywine Park, across Franklin Street from the apartments provided for hospital interns and staff (we moved there, which was a short walk from Memorial Hospital, after Monroe apartments).

8. I remember going down to the Brandywine Canal and seeing a mass of baby catfish. Taking a Styrofoam cup, as I recall, and scooping up a batch of the babies I quickly withdrew my hand when a large catfish (the presumed mother) swam in my direction.

9. My first school, Highland Elementary, where I attended 1st grade was about a six-block walk from our apartment on Franklin Street, and I would walk it alone in the morning passing the bus station and the Acme supermarket.

10. My first and only fight took place on the playground at Highland when, to my heroic recall (probably embellished), I defended a kindergartener from a bully 5th grader and actually threw a punch that bloodied his nose (this may be utter fiction but it’s what I recall).

11. Growing up, we traveled a lot. My dad loved to take off and see things during extended vacations of two or three weeks. We went out west to California and north to Canada by car. The Caribbean was our destination on at least three occasions where in Trunk Bay, snorkeling, I encountered a belligerent, tiny black fish that confronted me in front of his territory. It worked as I quickly turned and swam away. There is nothing as beautiful as seeing the world beneath a crystal blue ocean. The manta rays are particularly spectacular. We also made amazing trips to Europe, England, and the Far East (Japan, Thailand, Macau, the Philippines, and Hawaii).

12. I love classical music as a result of its constant playing by my father who collected thousands of records, his first being the Brahms’ Violin Concerto with Jascha Heifetz in New York when he arrived in the early 1950s. He didn’t even have a record player and had to listen to it on a fellow hospital resident’s phonograph.

13. An old, smallish, turtle-shell book of the Quartets of Beethoven that my father owned became a treasured memory to me as we would follow the music as the Fine Arts Quartet would play Opus 74, The Harp, and Opus 95, The Serious. I was crazy for the ending of 95 and even included it on a party tape for my fraternity, Lambda Chi Alpha, at the University of Delaware. It was not well received.

14. I am a failed pre-med student. As a little over one-year biology major at the University of Delaware, I was keelhauled by organic chemistry. Seems as though discipline and long study hours are essential to doing well. I did neither so I changed my major to English with a concentration in journalism. You can bullshit your way through essay exams in English with a few sound ideas on a piece of literature. I also took photography, which I took a great hankering and ability too. It served me well as I became a photojournalist and worked for three daily newspapers over 15 years.

15. Susan Katherine Thisell accepted my proposal for marriage outside a Steak ‘n Ale in Charlotte, North Carolina, when I extended the ring to her when we got back into the car (if I had it to do over again, it would not have been so unromantic). We were married 24 years and have two children, Nicholas (b. July 1988) and Lindsay (b. May 1990), and are currently separated and planning to divorce, amicably, in 2009.

16. At present, I am working toward a Masters in School Library Science at the University of South Carolina’s School of Library & Information Science through distance education. All of the classes are taught online through a program called Blackboard. We usually meet as a class once on the main campus.