Bringing Up Minds Blog

High School and College Reading: An Elusive Recipe

Dr. Mel Levine — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 03:36:00 -0900

12 Vital Ingredients for Bringing Up Readers

According to recent findings gathered by the Carnegie Corporation of New York (reported in the April 2010 issue of Educational Update), early elementary school students have been improving markedly in reading, whereas, beginning in 4th grade and on into secondary school, “reading skills don’t grow enough to meet the challenging literacy demands of high school and college.”

In fact, reading turns off far too many adolescents, who may process as few pages of print or screens of text as they can get away with. Many are prone to read in a superficial, frenzied fashion, gliding through text like competitive snowboarders. The goal simply is to get to the finish line. Appropriately paced reading feels tedious and dull to them. Ultimately, learning loses out.

Content area (specialized) reading in high school and college draws upon a mixed assemblage of abilities and mind habits, a recipe combining numerous brain-based ingredients. When an adolescent cannot or will not read with much enthusiasm, it is likely that one or more of these essential reading ingredients has been ignored or left out. Any teen or college student can derive pleasure and insight from reading if and when the proper ingredients are properly blended. That means that each element must be identified, thought about, and, if need be, consciously infused into the reading blender.

The Table below summarizes the 12 most essential adolescent reading ingredients:

Reading’s Ingredients in High School and College

RETAINING	Ingredient # 1	Identifying Words Automatically
	Ingredient # 2	Entering Information in Memory
	Ingredient # 3	Holding Together Parts of Texts
	Ingredient # 4	Summarizing/Re-synthesizing
INTERPRETING	Ingredient # 5	Uncovering/Inferring Word Meanings
	Ingredient # 6	Visualizing and Creating Imagery
	Ingredient # 7	Unraveling Sentence/Paragraph Structure
	Ingredient # 8	Linking Newly Read Inputs to Prior Learning
REGULATING	Ingredient # 9	Maintaining Focus/Fending Off Fatigue
	Ingredient # 10	Adjusting Reading Tempo and Mode
	Ingredient # 11	Reading with an Active/Resonating Mind
	Ingredient # 12	Understanding if You’re Understanding

It can be seen that the ingredients of reading fall into three general categories – retaining, interpreting, and regulating.

Retaining

It is easy to overlook the heavy memory strains felt by adolescent readers. Not only must they be able to identify previously encountered words automatically (in milliseconds and with precision), they must just as quickly associate words with their stored meanings (so-called “lexical access”). Inefficiencies in either of these “circuits” trip up a young reader, making word identification painfully slow and demanding. As a result, there are scant mind resources left for sophisticated comprehension, while any possible reading pleasure is out of reach.

As students read, they have to keep entering new data or information in memory for later use. This requires having a reasonably organized internal filing system that allows one to store material in categories or paired associations (wars with dates, names with faces) or else bind new information to previously acquired related knowledge or experience. Some kids are so disorganized in their learning that they simply lack any workable filing system; they have trouble therefore remembering or locating what they’ve read.

Another retaining pitfall involves active working memory or the ability to cling to parts of a flow of information whole it is flowing. A kid has to be able to recall information from the beginning of a passage while reading the final section(s), so he can weave it all together and make sense of the content. When this holding pattern fails to occur, reading is fragmented, disjointed, and incoherent. And it’s definitely unrewarding.

A final memory-laden ingredient resides in a teen’s ability to summarize what she’s read. Summarization skills ought to be nurtured in every student in every subject. They bring together the recall and organization of facts or ideas, language production, understanding, and saliency determination (determining what’s most important). At home and in school, kids need to be practicing, shaping up their reading summarization astuteness.

Interpreting

Reading is an act of interpretation, the first step of which involves the deciphering of word meanings. High school students meet up with hoards of words that are not a part of everyday speech. Technical vocabulary, foreign words, abstract, and symbolic words aggressively invade all facets of the curriculum. Some students fail to grasp the content because they have only a superficial (at best) understanding of word meanings.

Top notch readers visualize while they read. Forming mental images or internal pictures bolsters comprehension as well as retention. It has been found that talented math students run videos in their minds as they attack word problems. Our kids live in a culture where visual experience is predominant. So imagery can help entice them to savor their reading more thoroughly and thoughtfully. Kids lacking pictorial backdrops miss out on a dimension of written language that could enable them to resonate more intimately with what’s on a page.

Another interpretation hurdle crops up as teenagers contend with increasingly complex sentences and paragraphs whose structures themselves convey significant meaning. Kids who themselves are in the habit of emitting terse, incomplete sentences or phrases may falter in unraveling embedded clauses, passive forms, and sentences that are factually dense or lengthy. Paragraphs too have their underlying formats - compare and contrast (pervasive in social studies), a causal chain (common in biology and chemistry), a description (say in a poem or a biography), an argument (such as in an editorial or blog), and a chronological sequence (as in history or fiction). Good readers are good at ferreting out and benefiting from these semi-hidden structures. Struggling readers often seem oblivious to them.

As mentioned earlier in this blog, the attachment of newly read information to what’s been learned previously is key to retaining, but it is equally germane as an ingredient of understanding. Some readers fail to forge these linkages and therefore make too little use of prior knowledge to enlighten current understanding.

Regulating

Not only does the reading process entail remembering and understanding, it also demands regulating. A mind has to be calibrated properly to engage in meaningful reading. First, reading requires sustained alertness, which, in turn, calls for concentration and the ability to ward off the ever present threats of distraction and mental fatigue - sometimes referred to by kids as “boredom” (a common complication of adolescent reading). A portion of the energy supply that fuels alertness is formed from motivation – a desire to read, a desire to succeed, a desire to find out about something. Another factor is a product of a student’s brain wiring, namely, how well his attention works in general. Kids with attentional dysfunctions are apt to find that some or all reading causes them to daydream and keep tuning out. So they may take away only a foggy overview of a chapter’s content, a shadowy silhouette devoid of depth and detail.

As kids read to meet their needs and desires, they need to adjust their modes of reading and their tempos. But are they controlling these regulatory knobs appropriately? Reading modes include: skimming to get the general idea, in-depth reading for implied or buried meaning, scanning text to locate something specific, reading to retain certain information or data, reading critically, and re-reading. Readers shift gears depending upon the nature or purpose of their reading. Problems ensue when a kid is reading too fast, skimming when he should be focusing with greater intensity or maybe even over-focusing and therefore reading too slowly, say on his time-limited achievement test – in other words, there may be a mismatch between a reading purpose and a student’s reading mode or tempo.

What’s going on in the mind of a reading adolescent? While surveying a page, is he just passively sopping it up like an almost saturated sponge? Is he on a visit to another realm, plotting awesome weekend plans or deciding what to say when in 10 minutes he’s promised to text his girl friend? A competent teenage reader goes at it with activated brain neurons that respond energetically to what’s on the page. His own life experience and perceptions are brought to bear as he identifies with the written offerings. He is agreeing or disagreeing with a point of view, perceiving relevance or irrelevance, thinking up possible ways he can use new found information, and/or evaluating critically the author’s contentions or the story’s plot. His deciphering of text triggers a volley of brain reactions. He is engaged in active reading. Regrettably, in some teens, that regulatory knob too often is turned too low; consequently, there is insufficient brain responsiveness. Then reading becomes “a drag.”

While reading, not only must students understand, but, as well, they must understand whether they understand. Such comprehension monitoring is a vital regulatory control. If you don’t understand but you know that you don’t understand, you can slow down, re-read, look up a word, or ask for assistance. But if you do not understand that you do not understand, you soon could feel stranded amid a dense thicket of wordy chaos!

The Supply Side

Any missing ingredient can be supplied and improve a kid’s reading. Enthusiastic, skilled readers may already possess all the right ingredients, having picked them up instinctively or as a result of excellent teaching. Some kids once had them but have not kept up. Others have always lacked much needed ingredients. It is suggested that parents and others make use of the Bringing Up Minds Reading Cultivator to get further tips on supplying those missing ingredients as needed. It is also very likely that all students can make gains as readers simply by understanding and deriving their own best ways of augmenting these ingredients.

The Table at the start of this blog features a blank column that can be used by a parent to check off any ingredients that appear to be in short supply when a particular kid reads. If your child is a reluctant, slow, or misunderstanding reader, try filling in this last column. Importantly, you can get your kid to assist you in completing this checklist by discussing each ingredient with her so as to decide if she’s got enough of it.

Understanding how reading works can go a long way toward making it work better!

Inference Makes a Difference

Dr. Mel Levine — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 16:01:00 -0900

Nobody tells us all we need to know. There's almost always some information missing that a listener, a reader or an observer needs to supply to acquire the full meaning or true significance of something. And that's what's meant by inference drawing, one of the most important brain functions kids need to be developing during their years of education. Ironically though, how many kids can tell you what an inference is? Precious few! Think about the following inferential scenarios:

It's a late summertime afternoon when suddenly a violent wind erupts as the sky gets very dark and the temperature drops. Rodney might draw the inference that there is about to be a thunder storm (an observational, non verbal, inference – the kind that helps you make pretty good predictions).
Cathy invites Betty to her house to play, and Cathy also invites Betty to her birthday party next week. Cathy never actually says so, but Betty can draw the inference that Cathy likes her (a social inference, one that helps one take the perspective of another person).
Sandra overhears that Thomas and Steven play together every day after school, but that they keep arguing and fighting with each other at bed time almost every night. No one has told her, but she draws the inference that they must be brothers (a verbal inference – extracted from spoken or written language).
Vincent has learned in health class that mono- and poly-unsaturated fats are good for you, whereas saturated fats are bad. After school, he reads the label on his bag of milk chocolate kisses (sky high in saturated fats, lacking the mono- and poly- types). He draws the inference that he ought to consume a maximum of four morsels of the luscious treats (a well reasoned inference, impacting on behavior).
Edgar on his report card has received a failing grade in Spanish. He infers from this that his Spanish teacher hates him, even though she's never said so (quite possibly a false inference tainted by negative feelings or shame).

Kids draw inferences all the time – supplying missing information without realizing that's what they're dong. But are they drawing accurate inferences? And upon what evidence are they basing their inferences? A brief article by Robert J. Marzano in the April 2010 edition of Educational Leadership thoughtfully examines inference drawing, pointing out: "...we've become aware that some cognitive processes are foundational to higher-order thinking. Inference is one of these foundational processes."

Marzano distinguishes between two kinds of inferences, namely, default inferences and reasoned inferences. Default inferences are based largely on precedent, past experience, patterns that keep coming back (like the thunderstorms cited above). The default process is relatively automatic or unconscious. Reasoned inferences, on the other hand, call for deeper thought or logical thinking using evidence, such as in the chocolate example above in which Vincent's evidence and his premises derive from his analysis of package labeling and use of prior learning. The Bringing Up Minds Applied Reasoning Cultivator offers further insight into such essential processes.

If we feel the need to do so, we can divide inferencing into a nearly endless array of specific targets – verbal, visual, social, mechanical, moral, athletic, scientific, aesthetic, etc. And it is likely that any kid will harbor uneven-ness across her various inference-drawing competencies. She may be more effective at drawing inferences from verbal inputs than from what she sees around her. An automobile mechanic is likely to be a far more brilliant inferential thinker with his head under the hood of a car than he is when he reads a poem drenched with symbolism. Expertise, talent, and lots of experience fuel inferencing and make it less likely that a person will be deceived and draw false inferences.

A fundamental premise in Bringing Up Minds is that children will become far more sophisticated and effective thinkers if they understand their own thought processes and also if they have the specific words for the mind functions they need to be using (check out our video called "Finding a Language"). That means that a child will be more accurate with inferences if and when he knows the meaning of the word "inference," - what it is, how it gets used, how it can get help you understand, how it can get things wrong, how it ought to be based on evidence and sound reasoning. Parents can reinforce this knowledge and insight by inquiring explicitly from time to time, "What inference(s) are you gathering from (this situation with your friend, this politician's campaign speech, this weather forecast, this late breaking news story)?"

It might be beneficial to have a child compile a bulleted list of the major inferences she has drawn from her recent experiences and learning. Entitled "My Leading Inferences for this Week," the list could be divided into social inferences, school subject inferences, family-related inferences and "other."

Mothers and fathers should be vigilant for any forms of inference drawing that causes their child repeated difficulty (i.e., makes false inferences or none at all). This shortfall may be uncovered in mathematics, reading comprehension, social life, sports, or other endeavors. Such zones of chronically poor or absent inference drawing can place a kid at risk for academic failure, misguided behaviors, or poor judgment. Moreover, children who take everything at face value, failing to infuse missing information, may become naïve, gullible, and overly concrete in their thinking. A parent can make such negative outcomes less likely by heightening a child's awareness, making sure that the term "inference" gets to be a household word.

Most importantly, if a child is emerging as a star inference drawer in an area, parents should draw the inference that they will need to cultivate that domain of his strength, which could have compelling implications for how he will help to support them in their old age!

Dumbing Up Adolescence: The Cognition-Free Life Styles of Some Teens

Dr. Mel Levine — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 06:17:00 -0900

Every so often a personal experience compels one to assume the self-appointed role of an unbiased (?) observer and commentator on the local contemporary-cultural-historical scene. So please forgive this blogger as he waxes overly anecdotal.

Last weekend I accompanied my needy spouse to a rather expansive if not expensive outlet mall in a touristy refuge nestled amid the mountains of western North Carolina. I found myself meandering in a gymnasium-sized shoe and sneaker emporium, populated largely by an enthused teenage buying public. On this particular Saturday, everything in the store was selling at 50% off (that is to say, half-price) - allegedly. As I explored the facility and its merchandise, I came across a conveniently located and highly conspicuous wall chart which looked just like this:

Regular Price	Sale Price (50% Off)
$30	$15
$20	$10
$10	$5

At first glance this chart looked reasonably benign, and the math was impressively accurate. What astounded me was how many adolescent shoppers were actively consulting the chart, repeatedly revisiting and scrutinizing it with earnest intensity as they compared their potential purchases to their available resources. My reluctant but inescapable conclusion was that these kids had not yet incorporated their 2’s! They were either unwilling or unable to perform their own purchasing calculations. That is, division by 2 was still an alien process, at best confined to a desk within a classroom. Was this quantitative chasm a product of the mountain air (i.e., low-ish oxygen) or a reflection on the teaching and learning of arithmetic concepts and their practical applications in secondary schools?

I wandered as I wondered about this, left the store new shoeless, then strayed into a supermarket where I did manage a modest purchase (at 100%). As I went through the checkout line, I watched a 17 year-old or so scanning people’s mostly nutritionally toxic acquisitions. He was performing a skein of addition challenges plus change-making calculations at the cognitive level of his right elbow; his electronic collaborator did it all. The boy no doubt was strengthening his forearm muscles as he toiled, but there was little evidence that any brain growth or stringent mind utilization was occurring during his rhythmic motor routines. I was a bit worried that, over time, his right arm muscles might hypertrophy inordinately, creating a potentially unattractive asymmetry between his two hairless upper limbs. I chose not to warn him of this danger, since teenagers are so uptight about their physical appearance.

When it was my turn to submit to his elbowing, the boy asked me in a flat monotone and with zero eye contact, “payplass?” I said excuse me, and he re-uttered that elusive fragment of technical semantics. On deep reflection I realized he was asking whether I desired to have my purchase accommodated in a paper bag or a plastic sac. If I owned a supermarket, I would require all my adolescent workers to speak in full sentences, so that they would develop rather than stifle their verbal abilities. In fact, a kid should explore all the different ways he might pose the perpetually perplexing paper vs. plastic dilemma – “Would you prefer a paper bag or perhaps a plastic one this afternoon would suit your needs” or “Do you have a distinct preference with regard to your bag options this morning?” That way we might cultivate a generation of highly articulate fluent nerds - one could do worse.

My assigned cashier then inquired, sustaining the absent lilt of his monotone drawl, “Did you find everything you needed?” Frankly, this question came across to me as condescending and insulting, as it implied I was a quitter, that I was about to flee the store having failed to get what I came for and that I was too proud, arrogant, or shy to seek help before arriving at the checkout line. Anyway, the far more pressing economic issue for me, and the one he failed to discern, was whether I needed everything I found!

When I picked up my selections so as to depart, I said “thank you” to my yawn-suppressing, pathetically bored cashier. He responded, “Not a problem.” I felt confused as to what perceived problem he was referring to, since my milk transaction did not strike me as a legitimate “problem” in the problematic sense of the word “problem.” Nevertheless, I re-thanked him, this time for reassuring me that I was not a problem (my mother never did that). Then he said with a partial grin, “Have a good one.” A good what? I suspect in this context “one” refers to a time interval (a good day, a good weekend, etc.), but it’s hard to be sure about such distinctions. We need to encourage teens to express themselves with far greater precision and elaboration than is conveyed by the vague enunciation of the word “one.”

I think it’s great that kids have jobs after school and on weekends. Work is a critical component of education. Youth who are never employed are deprived. However, we have to look at the nature and content of their jobs. With minimal effort, employers can ensure that their teenage employees are not enduring a form of gradual brain shrinkage. Tasks should be rotated to dampen monotony.

Adolescents should be learning how the business is run. They should be applying relevant math skills. Employers or managers ought to conduct classes for their fledgling work force, who should be making good eye contact with customers, trying to understand their individual needs, and, in particular, learning to communicate effectively, even advancing beyond the useful contraction “payplass.”

Finally, when adolescents themselves are the customers, they need to be enhancing their skills and reputations as masterful mathematicians. So let’s not post the answers in the store.

By the way, please don’t share this blog with any adolescents; it runs the risk of infuriating them..

Why Don't You Show Your Work?

Dr. Mel Levine — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 05:07:00 -0900

Why Getting There Should Be (At Least) Half the Answer

Mom (helping her 13 year-old with math homework): William, you have to show your work; put down how you got that answer.

William: C’mon, bug off, mom! I shouldn’t have to show my work as long as I get the answer correct.

Who’s right and who’s wrong in this highly inflammatory dispute – William or his mom? The answer is undeniable. In this instance (but not all the time), mother knows best.

Over the course of your formative years, while your brain is assembling its semi-permanent tool kit, the way you go about solving a problem or meeting a robust challenge is at least as important as getting it right. Mathematics is a prime example. Kids have to apply what they are learning to come up with optimal methods for arriving at best solutions. Otherwise, they are “winging it,” not really knowing what they are doing, which could be a setup for future failure as problems inevitably grow in complexity. And it is possible and common for a student to get the right answer for the wrong reason or maybe for no reason at all! It may be preferable to get the wrong answer having worked through its solution, methodically applying a logical approach. First choice, no doubt, would be to obtain the right answer while demonstrating that you arrived there systematically.

Showing your work forces you to think about what you’re doing and how best to do it, at the same time that it helps you become what I call a “methodologist,” someone who plans, organizes and implements solutions systematically. Many very bright children resist this approach. They want to get a problem over with expediently (sometimes that translates into impulsively). Being a methodologist takes more time and tenacity. That ability or inclination to work slowly eludes numerous students. Yet, several studies comparing true experts in a field to novices in the same area, have demonstrated, perhaps surprisingly, that accomplished people do their work more slowly than beginners.

Parents and educators should collaborate in helping children and teens become top notch methodologists. Some sophisticated high schools are grading science students mainly on their science notebooks rather than their performance on multiple choice tests in physics or chemistry. After all, your notebooks reveal how systematic you are in your observations and experimental methods. In the long run, these habits of mind will outlast your recall of the Kreb’s Cycle in biochemistry. Not only that, the minutiae of chemistry will serve you well if and only if you become a chemist or enter an allied field, whereas compiling a stellar science notebook imparts a skill that can be exported to a wide range of endeavors, from writing screenplays to maintaining excellent medical records.

Similarly, before kids undertake a project in social studies or a report in an English class, they should be required to compile a workable work plan, one they can go on to revise as needed and submit along with their written report or hands-on product. A big chunk of their grade ought to reward their methods (i.e., the quality of the plan) or else “penalize” the absence of any strategic approach.

From time to time, prior to studying for examinations, students can chart a test preparation plan, a well thought out process for studying. Their plan should be submitted and evaluated for extra credit. Once again, we want to stress that how you got there is at least as important as where you got to!

All of these activities can imbue kids with an attribute called stepwisdom, the basic notion that when you engage in something significant, complex, or massive, it needs be done in steps rather than randomly or all at once. Budding methodologists have to become keen practioners of stepwisdom.

It’s also a good idea to have kids come up with plans or methods that comprise end products in themselves. All students should be taught to write grant proposals, contracts and business plans. Their essence would be: What do you plan to do? What steps will you carry out in doing so? What methods will you launch to meet your objectives (and pay for them!)?

Some Tips for Parents

1. Parents should regularly ask a child how she came up with her solution to a word problem or her cool idea for a short story. They should praise a child at least as much for devising and using a clever method as they do for coming up with a positive result.

2. Kids benefit from plenty of opportunities to serve as teachers. They can show younger friends or siblings the way to solve a math problem, build a missile, or milk a cow. In doing so, they should do more than just demonstrate what they can do; it is essential that they keep putting their methods into words.

3. Parents should provide occasions for kids to plan upcoming family activities or important decisions. Children should formulate and record on paper the steps to be undertaken in planning a trip, purchasing a new TV set, or adopting a puppy.

4. Students can collaborate with their parents in organizing projects, studying for important examinations, or applying to colleges. The emphasis should be on pausing to consider alternative methods – then opting for the best one - prior to diving into a task or novel challenge.

5. Children need to understand that their performance in math and their enjoyment of the subject will rise if and when they show their work and talk about how they arrived at an answer. Doing so is likely to imprint methods that will keep on working for them.

6. Parents should influence teachers to sidestep an educational approach that rewards nothing else but coming up with correct answers. The current emphasis on standards and high stakes testing is propelling schools away from producing competent methodologists. As a result, kids are at risk for becoming not much more than adept skill imitators and factual regurgitators.

7. The Bringing Up Minds Cultivators devoted to Project Planning, Evaluative Thinking, Brainstorming, and Applied Reasoning can be used by parents to assist their children in becoming methodical thinkers and planners, conveying a skill set that will serve them well throughout school and adult life.

In summary, a central theme in bringing up a mind ought to be framed in the question: “Can you tell us how you got there?” The most significant learning takes place while figuring out how to reach a solution and then looking back to rethink how you got where you got. Ending up with the right answer is far less essential for the growth of a fertile mind.

Let There Be Light

Dr. Mel Levine — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 03:48:00 -0900

The Price of a Life in the Great Indoors

Countless children and adolescents celebrate the marvels of indoor life. Never before in history have as many children spent as much of their existence sequestered indoors. Their recreation and school work are snugly under cover, shielded from the sun’s penetrating rays. Is this a bad thing? Or is it a trivial concern?

A recent article in Science (February 26, 2010) entitled “Dimly Lit Teens,” points to some experimental data suggesting that their lack of exposure to the outdoors may be causing problems for some teens. Specifically, many are experiencing trouble getting to sleep at night – some unable to fall asleep before 2 or 3 AM. As a result, they endure agonizing fatigue (often self-described as “boredom”) in the classroom. These individuals lack sufficient mental energy to concentrate and become academically productive. Many suffer from what I call “output failure.” Nothing demands a richer flow of mental energy than sitting immobile in one spot and focusing on not especially entertaining input – hard to pull off if you’re sleep deprived!

Shedding Light

In an experiment conducted by Mariana Figueiro at RPI’s Lighting Research Center, eighth graders in a classroom with skylights wore orange colored goggles to filter out blue light during the school day. After a week it was found that these kids were experiencing a delay in the secretion of melatonin, a brain chemical that induces sleep. Dr. Figueiro points out: “The amount of light we get indoors is below threshold for activation of the circadian system.” In other words, indoor light fails to support the important cycles of sleep and wakefulness (i.e., alertness). Another sleep expert, Mary Carskadon, generally concurs. The report in Science concludes, “…the shortage of outdoor light in most schools - compounded by the indoor-oriented existence of the modern teen – may be contributing substantially to below-par school performance.”

There certainly exists a demonstrated association between the adequacy of sleep and overall school performance. In some cases, it may not simply be a matter of trouble falling asleep or sleeping too few hours; some kids fail to get enough of the right kinds of sleep. They struggle with the quality as opposed to the quantity of their slumber. A lack of sound sleep appears to exert its major harm on the functions of memory and attention (See The Bringing Up Minds blog on sleep and our video series on attention). A brain must be properly primed and rejuvenated at night if it is to mobilize required alertness the next day. Moreover, it is well established that a range of memory functions are hard at work during deep sleep – if and only if there is enough deep sleep.

Lighting Up

When kids are underperforming in school, their parents should always evaluate the adequacy of their sleep. And in those cases where a sleep shortfall may be interfering with attention and memory, it is worth considering the possibility of a solar light deficiency as one contributing factor (probably not the sole cause). Some children may be more susceptible than others to the harmful effects of outdoor light deprivation. In such instances and, more than likely, in all kids, the following few tips for parents have the potential to be beneficial:

1. Every effort should be made to involve young children and teens in outdoor pursuits for at least an hour a day.

2. If possible, children should walk all or part of the way to school. The family car and public transportation should be avoided whenever possible. When visiting the mall, try parking in the most remote spaces.

3. Parents should join with their children in taking walks, engaging in outdoor games or other activities, and planning holidays with a predominant outdoor component. Mothers and fathers, like their kids, may emerge more competent after a good night’s sleep.

4. Urge the school to consider holding some classes outdoors in nice weather.

5. If your community is planning to build a new school, urge the authorities in power to consider putting skylights in the classrooms (a problem in urban high rise schools, but they should include some rooftop sky lit learning sites). Perhaps new school buses should be fabricated with skylights as well. Also every new gymnasium and workout facility should import abundant outdoor rays.

6. Parents should seek a thorough evaluation when sleep grief is chronic and seems to be impeding learning and/or behavior. Many medical centers and some private facilities conduct sleep clinics designed to help with the understanding and management of these problems.

In conclusion, sunlight should be thought of as a vitamin required for the health and optimization of all growing minds. It is up to parents to devise life style changes that bring the outdoors into the lives of indoor kids. Hopefully, in the future there will be a requirement that all computer games operate only on solar power!

What Gets Connected and What Gets Disconnected When Kids Get Hyperconnected?

Dr. Mel Levine — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 05:25:00 -0900

A Blog in 4 Parts Concerning Children, Adolescents, and the Media

Part 4 – The Games Kids Play

Q: “Are there kids in your school who play games too much of the time?”

10^th Grader: “Yeah, lots of them”.

Q: “What happens to them?”

!0^th Grader: “They fry their brains.”

A report from The Pew Internet and American Life Project (September 2008) revealed that an astounding 97% of teens (12 to 17 year olds) play computer, web, console, or portable games. 80% play five or more different games, and 40% play eight or more. On any given day, 50% of them engage in this activity. In all likelihood, utilization rates have escalated further since that report was issued. Younger children reveal similar patterns to teens, and both genders are heavily involved. Gaming has become one of the most heavily occupied arenas in the lives of contemporary kids. Does this phenomenon have any significance at all, or are we just witnessing an inevitable new form of entertainment predictably following on the restless heels of radio programming, cinema, TV shows, hit recordings (from vinyl to CD’s and DVD’s) and other historical media? Games may represent nothing more than the latest “advance” in man’s eternal quest for new diversions.

Many parents worry about their children’s infatuation with computer games. But as with other media, most of these pastimes in themselves are likely to be fairly benign until they become obsessions. Without a doubt, there are console-based or portable games steeped in violent themes, eliciting fiercely aggressive actions, while stimulating impulsively generated reactions to rapid-fire stimuli. Let’s examine the mind risks as well as the potential benefits of game engagement.

The Positive Sides

Games deliver some dividends for growing minds. Often they are a social activity. Kids who are shy, non-athletic, or socially awkward may find a prestigious niche among their peers if they are skilled and notably knowledgeable when it comes to gaming. Some serve as sought after experts or consultants to their less game-savvy peers. They become widely respected “geeks” with resultant boosts in self-esteem. Game play can be their passkey into an otherwise inaccessible world of sharing and collaborating. Parents should encourage and respect the interest in games, which can help some individuals acquire much needed social experience and skill (See the Bringing Up Minds video series on social skills).

Many media games have the potential to enhance children’s spatial thinking and nonverbal reasoning. There is evidence that consistent playing also can improve their reaction times (how rapidly they respond to an incoming stimulus), while fortifying a range of motor functions (specifically eye:hand coordination, motor speed and motor sequencing). The question is: How will such gains impact an individual’s educational experience and ultimately the pursuit of a career? Precious few occupations demand terrific reaction time (race car driving, professional sports, and the front lines of battle being notable exceptions). Spatial thinking and problem solving, on the other hand, are serious players in numerous fields, such as computer technology, engineering, and all sorts of endeavors entailing art, construction, repair, and design. It may well be the case that a sizable portion of kids with an especially compelling attraction to games will need to navigate toward these hands-on career ventures.

Children have always loved finding role models they can emulate. Some games are designed to help them make believe they are rock stars, football players (or coaches), and/or heroic combatants. Of course, there are games instigating negative role modeling. Fortunately, many encourage imaginary play, a healthy mode of mind expansion and mental relaxation.

The Risky Sides

Small to moderate dosages of computer gaming (90 minutes or less per day) are very unlikely to have substantial negative effects on the minds of children and teenagers. In fact, they should be seen as the modern way most kids find relaxation. But one can wonder how much relaxation a 14 year old really needs!

Very heavy exposure carries some clear risks. First of all, as of now, the vast majority of computer games are entirely nonverbal. Language growth, one of the most important components of brain development, is in no way fostered by “Guitar Hero,” “Solitaire,” “Tetris,” or most other popular games. In fact, in excess, these activities may thwart language development.

The teenage years are a time when kids’ minds are supposed to be reaching toward higher language. This includes the ability to listen, read, write, and think with language that is abstract, symbolic, or technical, and sentences that have unstated implications requiring that you draw inferences (they don’t tell you everything – you need to supply missing information and draw your own conclusions). This is also a period when language and memory have to become closely allied, so kids can learn from what they read and hear. In addition, this is an age when students should be building their expressive language, their ability to export their own thoughts (spoken or on paper) accurately and fluently. All this takes plenty of practice. Steady immersion in computer games may replace such practice or make verbalization feel irrelevant or alien. Do we run the risk of producing a generation of kids with mostly mediocre communication skills and limited verbal comprehension? It’s my impression that, to a degree, we are already encountering this phenomenon, as children and teens are becoming increasingly seduced by what I call “visual-motor ecstasy”!

What effect, if any, do games exert on children’s patterns of concentration? Are we seeing more kids with attention deficits as a direct result of their gaming? The answer is we don’t yet know, but we need to know soon. Many kids with attentional problems are highly impulsive; they do too many things too quickly without thinking them through. Some games reward rapid, downright impulsive thinking and acting. Children with attentional weaknesses commonly have trouble delaying gratification; most games offer them nearly instantaneous pleasure and immediate results. In some instance, gaming may worsen existing attentional problems.

On the other hand, there are some kids who have trouble concentrating well on anything EXCEPT their computer games. It may be that some of them are learning to focus and filter out distractions by tuning in intently to their consoles or hand-held devices. Will this pattern spread to other areas of their lives, including schoolwork? As yet, there has been no strong evidence for this, but we can hope.

The Potential Good Side

Games are rapidly coming into their own as educational media. Their formats increasingly are being applied to enhance skills in reading, math, spelling, history, sciences, and a host of other essential learning areas. The Pew Internet & American Life Project (2008) has shown that children can acquire a much greater interest in civics (politics and government) when that subject gets transformed into a game-playing challenge (which fortuitously may mirror politics in the real world!).

Readily bored students may respond to the action conveyed on a computer monitor with reinvigorated mental energy and motivation. Most importantly, these media call for a high level of interactive learning, hopefully revving up minds that are habitually passive in a traditional classroom. Whether we like it or not, games are emerging as one of the primary ways modern kids will need to be taught and helped to become academically productive. Is there a downside to this trend? Probably not. However, when you find yourself embedded in a career, you may have trouble convincing your boss that a critical task or job assignment can only be tackled if it’s entertaining – if it’s a game!

Tips for Parents

There is much that parents can do to bring out the positive side of technological gaming and minimize any undesirable side effects. Here are some suggestions:

1.      To prevent the alleged “frying” of brains (whatever that is), parents need to impose some time limits on games that are played strictly for entertainment (as opposed to learning). It would seem that 90 minutes per day is a sufficiently generous time allotment.

2.      It is important to be on the lookout for computer games that kids can play at home to reinforce the knowledge and skill they are picking up in the classroom. The Bringing Up Minds website will be endeavoring to let parents know about these.

3.      Parents should try to discourage their kids from just focusing on the most violent computer games and those that reward impulsive responding.

4.      There should be an effort to ensure that games are not replacing or displacing important areas of brain development, especially language and attention (including the ability to delay gratification).

5.      It is also essential that games not limit kids to life in the great indoors, crowding out opportunities to become creative in some area(s) or chances to appreciate the outdoors and participate in sports, music, or the arts.

6.      Kids who are heavily involved in games should be prompted to develop their own original games.

7.      Children who exhibit weak social skills should be discouraged from playing games by themselves; the gizmos should be a way of fostering positive social interactions and building friendships.

8.      Games can be a kid’s specialty, but they should never be his sole affinity. She or he needs to be developing other outside interests and passions.

9.      Parents should strive to show a sincere interest in a child’s computer gaming, occasionally even engaging in this form of play (and, in all likelihood, losing) following patient instruction from their sons or daughters. It is not a good idea to disparage the games. Rather, a player deserves praise for becoming proficient and knowledgeable, even if his father or mother would have preferred a kid who’s a basketball star or editor of the school paper.

What Gets Connected and What Gets Disconnected When Kids Get Hyperconnected?

Dr. Mel Levine — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 05:23:00 -0900

A Blog in 4 Parts Concerning Children, Adolescents, and the Media

Part 3 – DVD’s, MP3’s and their Own TV’s

From the threadbare living room couch to the bunk beds in the kids’ digs, from the breakfast table to their desks, and from the passenger seat to the toilet seat, each and every perch provides 24/7 ripe opportunities for kids to link up or plug in to limitless entertainment. With the flip of a switch (sometimes even without it), their eyes and ears can engage in well insulated synaptic connecting to music, situation comedy, mystery, fantasy tales, or sports. Is this seductive availability of sensory and cognitive diversion or immersion a good thing, or might it dull, perhaps even “dumb down,” the minds of children?

MP3 Music: Repetition, Recognition, and Retention

In this writer’s opinion, much of the joy as well as the risk of massive doses of entertainment resides in excessive repetition or redundancy. We all gravitate toward familiarity. People like TV comedies that ring true, striking a responsive chord, reminding them of episodes of their own everyday predicaments. It’s pleasurable to sing, hum, or whistle along when encountering melodies we’ve heard in the past. Musical familiarity conveys positive associations (with specific people or events), and there is satisfaction in recognizing a tune. As well, we enjoy a peculiar comfort when following a musical theme or lyric we’ve heard on multiple occasions in part because we know where it’s headed, how it’s going to end up. Our lives are plagued with agonizing uncertainties; familiar music offers a soothing certainty of outcome. Music has a distinct predictable beginning and end. Most segments of our lives do not.

There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that music has beneficial impacts on brain development, binding brain functions that ordinarily don’t get a chance to “play together,” including auditory processing, language, spatial thinking, sequencing, motor function (rhythms and dance), attention to detail, and multiple forms of memory. In this way music serves to strengthen the connections and intersections involving diverse brain regions. In part, this may account for the universal human attraction to music - across cultures and throughout eras. Learning to read musical notation and playing a musical instrument or singing is an especially rich contributor to mind building. Yet, we all know that any therapy has its beneficial effects, its side effects, and some hazards related to overdosing. Is it possible that music as well sometimes may have harmful side effects?

Music has the potential to thwart mind growth when it is extremely redundant, when kids have had their ears plugged up and their brains clogged up with songs they have heard hundreds of times in the last month or two! They’ve been overdosed. MP3’s (such as IPods) with their limited menus of personally preferred selections are especially likely to be heavily repetitious. Musical monotony can anesthetize the senses and screen out more challenging and provocative forms of stimulation. A child walking along with a gizmo plugged firmly into her ears is prone to become insensitive to the outdoors or to the diverse people around her. Parents should be especially concerned when a child seems addicted to a particular piece of music.

It is possible that different sorts of music have their own unique impacts on brain growth and performance. Of course it is now acknowledged that the so-called “Mozart Effect” (improved cognition in infants exposed to the composer’s works) extends beyond his offerings. One of a child’s most critical intellectual challenges entails the ability to recognize patterns in the presence of superficial differences. Crucial patterns crop up in spelling, punctuation rules, math processes, and poetry (among other places). In everyday life a new occurrence may seem to follow a pattern met with on one or more prior occasions, except this time it is a bit different. We have a run-in with a friend reminding us of a previous conflict, but this time around it’s not the same friend and the circumstances have changed somewhat. Kids need to acquire that ability to peel away superficial differences and recognize an underlying pattern (and how it turned out or was worked out). And that awareness may be conscious or unconscious. We see a painting we’ve never seen before but know from its style it must be by a particular artist. A teenager hears some music he’s never encountered before, yet realizes it is Hip Hop because he detects that familiar underlying pattern.

For centuries music has featured themes and variations – Mozart’s works and much jazz are prime examples. The variations reflect the pattern in the theme but with some alterations (different key, slower, upside down, etc.). Listening to such music offers kids valuable training in pattern recognition. But what if there are no variations? What if the music contains the same (brief) theme played over and over (and over)? The pattern detection challenge is absent, so the listener fails to make gains in his or her pattern recognition acuity – one of the risks associated with some music. Kids may also lose out if they perpetually are tuned to music that has extremely brief or fragmentary melodies, where the exclusive focus is on the beat.

Various components of memory may be expanded by listening to musical works with relatively long melodic lines, music where you need to retain the beginning of a tune while listening to its final part(s), so you can put it all together and appreciate it as a whole. That’s called active working memory (described fully on the Bringing Up Minds website).

Finally, musical lyrics have the potential to influence children’s language development - one way or the other. At their verbal best, songs, even nursery rhymes, deliver clever plays on words, challenging sentence structures, and flexible usage of vocabulary. But what if the only lyrics a kid encounters are totally unsophisticated, composed of everyday ordinary speech, mostly incomplete or primitively simple sentences, to say nothing of the most basic words (so-called “high frequency vocabulary”)? There may be exceptions; for example, some contemporary rap music could be enriching in promoting language sounds (rhyming) and novel relationships between words. But it’s probably fair to say that most contemporary songs beamed via ear buds are anything but verbally uplifting – a missed opportunity.

TV and DVD’s: Inactivity, Insensitivity, and Inevitability

Television has come under fire because of its alleged propagation of violence, its role in promoting childhood obesity (juvenile couch potatoes), its abject commercial exploitation of youth, and its sometime addictive qualities. But what about its possible effects on blossoming brains? When it comes to minds, television seems to be a mixed blessing. After all, educational programs, including documentaries, have always offered promise (if enough kids view them).

TV shows and DVD’s can be further sources of unthinking repetitiveness. Some kids will watch the same DVD movie repeatedly, as they apparently crave the mind-dulling comfort of redundancy and predictability. Additionally, TV may encourage passive processing. A child parked in front of a screen need not participate actively or form a personal response to what he is unthinkingly sopping up. Consider canned laughter; a young viewer need not even muster the intellectual resources to decide if something is funny or not. He just laughs on cue as the recorded hilarity is transmitted. And such passive processing can become a habit. Furthermore, the plots of many shows are entirely predictable and resolve themselves rapidly – with no calls for any delaying of gratification. Stories come packaged in convenient bite size chunks. Even the evening news is presented in such a way that little or no concentration and sustained focus are demanded. How can you be expected to slog your way through A Tale of Two Cities or your physics textbook when you’ve been brought up on plots that get resolved in a matter of minutes? Regrettably, the issues and impasses you endure during your lifetime almost never get resolved that fast. They are more like novels.

Finally, for the most part, TV has displaced a lot of reading and storytelling. In these traditional modes, kids had to listen or read attentively and supply their own mental imagery, a terrific way to add dimension to the meaningfulness of words and sentences. TV hands you prefabricated imagery. The capacity to derive your own mental imagery is well worth cultivating, as it can help foster success in numerous components of mathematics and scientific thinking as well as in art and design.

Tips for Parents

There is much a parent can do to minimize the negative effects of MP3’s, DVD’s, and TV’s while using them to good advantage. Here are few suggestions:

1. Parents should encourage kids to keep trying out new forms of music, new TV shows, and rented DVD’s that broaden their experience rather than constraining or duplicating it.

2. Kids should not have TV sets in their bedrooms. The American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended that kids under 3 have their TV viewing significantly limited. A DVD or TV show should not function as an enduring baby sitter.

3. It is important to stay vigilant in looking for upcoming documentary TV shows or DVD’s that have the potential to build knowledge and open up for a child new areas of interest and inquisitiveness.

4. Mothers and fathers need to keep reading to their young children. Kids should be asked repeatedly: “What pictures are you making inside your mind? What do you think this boy’s house looks like?” Kids benefit from a chance to re-tell or summarize stories that have been read to them.

5. Teenagers should never be plugged into their MP3’s outdoors.

6. Every child should learn to play a musical instrument (or take dance or singing lessons) and not be allowed to quit. Acquiring skill with an instrument has been shown to have very positive effects on learning and brain development in general. If a kid is fed up with his tuba, he should be allowed to take fewer lessons and practice less often, but it is a bad idea and an unwise precedent to run away from it.

7. Older children should get into the habit of reading or listening to books on tape (rather than music) just before or while falling asleep.

8. Many kids want to listen to music while they study or do homework. This should be considered an experiment: “It’s okay to try that music, and then we’ll see how you make out on the test tomorrow.” If it seems to help (or at least does not hinder), the musical accompaniment can be continued. Listening to music helps some kids concentrate by filtering out other distractions, providing a work rhythm, and combating boredom but It does not help ALL students – it’s certainly worth a try.

9. All of the media we have mentioned have the potential to become addictive. Parents should be watchful for this destructive risk. They may need to place stringent time limits on their use. A child should not perceive this restraint as unfair or a form of punishment. Instead he or she should be helped to understand the danger.

10. As we have seen, many of the effects of TV’s, DVD’s, and MP3’s impact on specific areas of school performance and brain function (especially attention, memory and language). Parents can learn more about these “targets” by keeping up with the latest knowledge and learning tools on our website bringingupminds.com.

What Gets Connected and What Gets Disconnected When Kids Get Hyperconnected?

Dr. Mel Levine — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:18:00 -0900

A Blog in 4 Parts Concerning Children, Adolescents, and the Media

Part 2 - Social Lives Online on the Line

The noted French philosopher-author, Jean Paul Sartre, once wrote: “One must choose whether to live one’s life or tell it.” This statement pertains profoundly to contemporary youth. Never before has it been as convenient and compelling to narrate your life, to share much of it in minute detail with your friends and maybe some family members, to say nothing of a limitless audience of total strangers. Numerous kids have succumbed to what we might call the “narrative imperative.” They tell their lives. What are the likely effect on developing minds of this ubiquitous trend?

Is Networking Nourishing or Impoverishing their Social Lives?

It doesn’t shake the earth to acknowledge that all of us have private and public lives. We partition our experiences and feelings into those best kept to ourselves and the ones worthy of open “publication.” Abetted by the sheer accessibility and sleek efficiency of cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, My Space and other social networking conduits, kids are becoming compulsive communicators. They are on a perpetual quest for material to share with others (mostly their friends). That means a larger and larger proportion of their life stories and thought processes are released and maybe even designed for wide consumption. It might also mean that they come to engage in activities that will make the best stories. That is, as Sartre would maintain, they are telling their lives. Cynically we may be tempted to accuse some of being “cell phonies.”

Many kids are in danger of becoming obsessed with the call to be highly attractive in the social networking sphere, fervently fashioning themselves to be appealing and marketable to peers, which could bring with it cascading conformity. Kids may define themselves by how they want others to perceive them (for example as “cool”). And some may be so bent on attracting peer acclaim that they devote less and less time to figuring out who they are and where they ought to be headed in life. Social networking can and does contribute to that risk. Vulnerable kids may be lured into becoming habitual “posers.”

In a recent series of studies (reported in Scientific American Mind January-February 2010), it was found that many teenagers used Facebook to relate to people they knew reasonably well. Their social communication presumably served to strengthen existing relationships. Others engage in networking to establish new ties. This latter group is more likely to harbor pre-existing interpersonal difficulties. They are more prone to social anxiety and extreme loneliness, states of mind that are seldom relieved through social networking. In fact, the more they immerse themselves in social networking the more superficial they become in relating to others. Some develop a highly confused sense of the meaning of friendship. Social networking definitely is not a panacea for loneliness; rather, it can worsen social anxiety! Ironically, media like Facebook, My Space, and Twitter are most helpful to individuals who already have effective social skills and successful social lives based on stable face-to-face relationships. But even that group becomes vulnerable if and when it obsesses on social networking and overuses its “airwaves.”

These studies confirm the vital role of face-to-face contact in forging and sustaining relationships. Body language, facial expression, joint or collaborative experiences or activities plus other variables play significant roles in reinforcing relationships. Social networking runs the risk of devaluing and diminishing such transactions. Also, might there be risks in an adolescent or pre-teen over-relating to one or more friends, getting socially overexposed?

Social success always has been a highly coveted reward for most school kids, yet harmful side effects may set in when that segment of a life is all-consuming, while other priorities (family, schoolwork, plans for the future) then are relegated to the bottom of the pile. The results of Facebook use and twittering are apt to be instantly gratifying but woefully short-lived. When your chums disperse, what are you going to be left with?

Modern day cyber-communication certainly has its commendable features. Social networking undoubtedly is helping some otherwise shy children experience the comfort of relating and feeling accepted (Please see The Bringing Up Minds Video Series on Social Skills.) In the case of kid with weak social skills, networking can help if it then leads to meaningful face-to-face relationships. For some, these media have the potential to blaze a trail toward much needed social contact and interpersonal confidence. In all cases, the technology can foster collaboration, consultation, and commiseration, as kids share their values, experiences and insights. Children can team up for cooperative brainstorming, joint problem-solving, studying for exams, and team learning – sometimes without even knowing each other. Importantly, media may help kids discover that they are facing perplexing life challenges akin to those of their peers everywhere (and, needless to say, misery loves company!).

Is their Language Languishing?

Kim: What are you doing?

Todd: Nm..u?

Kim: Watching tv

Todd: Disney channel?

Kim: Hahaha

Todd: Where r your room mates?

Kim: Idk

Todd: Swell

Kim: brb…bathroom

Todd: K

Kim: Back

Todd: Haha..wow!

[Excerpted from a Facebook dialog]

Text messaging, instant messaging, and certainly Twitter (with its 140 character quota) encourage highly concise communication, which at times may be preferable to outright verbosity (i.e., drivel) with low ideational density. On the other hand, people construct many of their best ideas through verbal elaboration – “How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?” (Please see the Bringing Up Minds Video Series on Language.) Elaborating with language also enhances remembering; kids who use words and sentences to extend their thinking and associations are more likely to recall ideas and facts accurately. Simply memorizing by swallowing information intact and unaltered – by rote - makes it harder to retrieve items from long-term memory. (Please see the Bringing Up Minds Memory Cultivator.)

In some cases, social networking’s stress on brevity works to a child’s advantage, unlocking communication in kids whose weak language abilities or social anxieties cause them to be taciturn, reluctant to engage in verbal expression. It feels safer when you don’t have to make eye contact with the listener. For most kids, however, a social network medium poses a possible threat to language development by stressing very concrete terms and descriptions based mostly on here-and-now experience, devoid of verbal concepts and abstract thought. Vocabulary building may come to a standstill. And only the most simplistic grammatical construction (often at a “partial sentence” level) gets summoned and strengthened. Sorry, there’s no room for clauses! The worst case scenario: language growth is stunted.

When kids spend long hours soldered into networks, their parents need to be tuning in carefully to how their children speak and write. They need to remind (i.e., “bug”) them to elaborate and to encode their thoughts into full sentences – even garnering heaped-on praise for the occasional use of a metaphor or simile (“forget it, mom!”). And they should ensure that their offspring are grappling verbally with abstract issues and concepts (e.g., global warming, symbiosis, good sportsmanship, and graduated taxation). And in this age of social networking, schools have to prioritize, more than ever before, the enrichment of kids’ oral language fluency and sophistication.

Should we be Groaning and Moaning over their Mobile Phoning?

More than 71% of teenagers, including 52% of 12 and 13 year-olds, now have their own cell phones, according to a recent study reported by Amanda Lenhart of the Pew Internet and American Life Project (“Teens and Mobile Phones Over the Last Five Years,” Pew Internet, August 2009). 12 to 17 year-olds are catching up with their parents, as 77% of adults possess such gizmos. Ownership of these devices penetrates all income levels, every ethnic group, and both genders. Among adolescents, talking on a cell phone each day is more frequent than communicating on a land line. And text messaging (another mode of seemingly “dumbed-down” language) occurs more frequently than mobile phone talk. The bulk of this communication is between friends.

Without question, kids have more access to each other than they have ever had before. Is this good or harmful? As yet, no one can answer that question. Adolescents have always been highly dependent on their peers. Friends enable you to feel accepted, affirmed, and affiliated. Teenagers have a morbid fear of isolation or, even worse, rejection. Deploying a cell phone, you can reaffirm your acceptance and your desirability multiple times a day. You can share feelings and “catharse” at a moment’s notice, which, even more firmly, can cement intimacy.

As with social networking, cell phone risks reside mainly in their excessive use and an over-reliance on peers, a social scenario that comes to eclipse too many other needed facets of life – especially future life. Some adolescents develop a condition I call “social intoxication.” They absorb hazardous levels of gratification from friendships and popularity. Mobile phones may help administer these overdoses. Very popular kids sometimes go on to acquire a trait called hubris, which, at its worst, can over-inflate their self-confidence and instill feelings of invulnerability. And that is a bubble that is going to burst some day.

Cell phone use has also altered parent-kid relationships. In some cases it has made adolescents and college students exceedingly dependent on their parents (especially their mothers) to an unprecedented degree. At worst, this may prevent young adults from bolstering their own everyday problem solving and coping skills. The typical undergraduate female cell phones her mom at least once a day; some call far more frequently. A parent may start to fret if she or he has not received a call in the last 6 hours! This pattern has encouraged and extended the creeping phenomenon of hovering parents. I recall when I was a college kid, I would conduct my concerted land lining on the dormitory payphone (reliably reversing the charges), and it was mainly to request supplementary funding – my parents saw through these superficially affectionate overtures, as they accurately suspected the principal motivation for the call! At this point, it is hard to predict the likely long-term impacts of mobile phone-augmented parenting on a young adult’s achievement of independence, career launching, and eventually marriage. We’ll see - or maybe we won’t.

A child’s possession of a cell phone actually can be mostly therapeutic for his or her parents. The devices can drastically reduce parental worry, but some fierce controversy has overspread many educational institutions when it comes to the use and possession of cell phones during the school day. In recent years many administrators have attempted to ban mobile phone use or even possession during the school day. Most such prohibitions have failed, as parents have insisted that mobile phones mobilize much needed safety and security. It is hard to argue with this, although the devices can and should be turned off and stored during classes and in sensitive venues (such as the locker room).

How Should Parents Handle Their Socially Bombarded and Bombarding Kids?

Social networking and cell phone use represent the very latest advances in kid culture’s unending succession of mixed blessings. It is likely that the impacts will be as varied as the diverse population of children themselves. So it is up to parents to gauge the effects of vastly expanded social communication on an individual child, so as to impose some called-for adjustments in frequency and length of use prn (as needed).

Do Differences in Learning Justify Differences in Teaching?

Dr. Mel Levine — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 04:22:00 -0900

Coping with the Spotty Track Record of “Learning Styles” Research

If a child is found to have a one strong pathway of information processing (say visual, verbal, or kinesthetic), will he or she learn best if a teacher’s method of teaching takes advantage of this superior pathway?

a). All of the time

b). Most of the time

c). Sometimes

d). Never

e). It all depends

f). None of the above

Many theorists, researchers, and seasoned clinicians and educators have spoken of significant differences in the ways individual kids seem to learn best, at times referring to their “learning styles.” Some children have been described as kinesthetic learners, others as visual, and still others as auditory or verbal in their preferred learning routes. As well, varied forms of intelligence or especially facilitated ways of thinking have been described, so that some children are depicted as highly divergent or creative in their thought processes, others practical and analytic, and still others “assimilative” or “accommodating” (less immediately obvious or self-explanatory). If in fact these subgroups of kinds of minds exist in each and every classroom, should teachers be aware of them and then be prepared to alter their teaching styles to match the diverse needs of diverse learners? That’s a tall order. But is it worth trying?

A team of researchers led by Harold Pashler at the University of California, San Diego systematically reviewed the numerous studies that have been conducted to find out if teaching tailored to students’ strengths improves their learning. In their article published in the December 2009 issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest (and quoted in Science), these investigators present a dim view of the research that has been done. They found few studies that were rigorous enough to be believed. The investigations were plagued by a widespread lack of control groups and randomized design (i.e., randomly assigning kids either to receive the individualized teaching or not to get it, then comparing the “treatment” and “non-treatment” groups). The authors conclude that at this point we shouldn’t be rushing to revise curricula and conduct teacher workshops aimed at such individualization of education. As they warn, “people out there are selling tests and packages and workshops without having any remote idea whether the methods they promote provide any real educational benefits.”

Where do we go from here? Should we abandon the quest for differences between learners? Should we adopt the fall back position proclaiming that plain old superb teaching is best for all kinds of learners (espoused apparently by the above authors)? Some heavy duty considerations need to be weighed and measured in trying to resolve this question.

First of all, any gleaning of the research on gearing curricula to the learning styles of kids must be viewed with some skepticism. Pashler and his colleagues are right in fretting over the lack of methodological rigor. But we all know how nearly impossible it is to do a randomized controlled study of a teaching method or intervention. The reluctance of school boards and citizens to agree to the random assignment of students to control groups can dishearten even the most ambitious assistant professor of psychology or education. Also, there is an irksome glitch called “treatment fidelity,” namely, can you be certain the teaching method you’re evaluating is being applied rigorously and consistently in the classroom with the door closed? Additionally, do we have confidence that those conducting the research are themselves unbiased and objective? Far too often academicians are studying the effectiveness of an innovation they themselves invented, something that could propel them to promotion at their University, widespread fame, and perhaps a modicum of measurable growth in their bank accounts. Such mostly unintended conflicts of interest commonly infect research on curricula, teaching methods, and tests.

Future research of this ilk should be conducted impartially by investigators with no vested interest in the outcome – and, of course, with sufficient rigor. As for the present, we should not assume that teaching to a child’s strengths is futile simply because the research up until now has failed to be convincing. That may change. We have to keep plugging away at this issue. We must seek tighter methods of conducting this sort of research. And we will always have to accept the reality that any sample of children we study is destined to be highly heterogeneous. On occasion, we may need to resort to case arguments or individual case controlled studies, while, at all cost rejecting anecdotal evidence and testimony, which is put forth all the time to support even the most outrageous interventions.

If indeed much of the research is seriously flawed, does it necessarily follow that teaching to strengths is a bad idea, one that can never work? The answer is no. But we have to admit that across the curriculum some cognitive strengths are more usable than others. For example, a high level of creativity may not be all that helpful in most of geometry, whereas a social studies unit that stresses creative thinking may be a perfect match for a kid whose mind wanders off on mind trips. That same creative student is likely to flunk a social studies class in which the memorization of names and dates is paramount. He would much rather deal with a question like “What would you have added if you had been creating the constitution?” to “When was the constitution signed?”

Seeming to be a so-called “auditory learner” may not comprise a shortcut to success in a studio art class - it may even get in the way! And being a world class kinesthetic learner (if there is such a thing) is unlikely to cause your creative writing grades to catapult. Any so-called “learning style” is only relevant to certain facets of a child’s entire learning experience.

A preferred mode of learning never operates in isolation. All children possess profiles consisting of their strengths, their areas of adequate functioning, and their specific deficiencies. A child’s pattern of learning does not only involve a preferred style but also his or her ways of navigating around or overcoming relevant relative weaknesses. For instance, if a student is declared to learn best visually but struggles with dysfunctions of attention plus active working memory, his visual processing assets may not be available for use in school. A teaching method that succeeds with a similarly visual learner who has intact attention may be useless in a visual learner who has trouble concentrating or retaining information. Consequently, on our Bringing Up Minds website (bringingupminds.com), we continue to emphasize strongly the notion that we need to be teaching to and managing children’s profiles rather than single traits in isolation. The interplay between traits is apt to be more vital than the status of individual traits. So the answer to the multiple choice question posed at the beginning of this blog is evident: “e). It all depends.” It all depends, in large part, on what else inhabits a kid’s profile.

Incidentally, I have a number of humble friends who are inveterate “foodies” (as am I). Some are wine aficionados as well. I am astounded at how competently these wine scholars (I’m not one) can sniff, describe, and remember the features of a particular vintage. They qualify as undisputed “olfactory learners” - so do my 5 dogs, but they deploy this strength to locate bones, having no motivation or inclination when it comes to fine wines. When stylistic olfactory friends were kids, the math departments of their middle schools would have been hard pressed to embrace teaching methods that might enable such nasal learning to render quadratic equations more aromatic! Nonetheless, olfactory learning is a diagnosable strength, arguably one worth identifying and cultivating, an asset that can lead to all manner of libation gratification in adulthood, perhaps eventually surpassing that continuing sense of fulfillment grownups derive from quadratic equations!

Parents, even more so than teachers, need to be aware of a child’s strong channels for taking in, retaining, using, and creating. Finding and clearing these pathways represents a key part of getting to know who your child is and what he may be wired for. It may be that so-called “learning styles” are more crucial for parenting than for formal education. If you believe that your child retains knowledge best when inputs are visual or graphic and he/she struggles with learning that is heavily wordy, then you might assist in her studying by helping her convert text into tables, diagrams, and computer-based graphics. This is far easier for a parent to accomplish with his daughter than it is for a classroom teacher confronted with 23 varied learning preferences. Furthermore, a mother and/or father’s awareness of a child’s optimal learning pathways has powerful implications for assisting her in choosing a career or a college, to say nothing of its role in just plain growing a mind that’s being helped to become what it may well be meant to be.

Good to Go? The Timing and Priming of Readiness for Kindergarten

Dr. Mel Levine — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 03:42:00 -0900

How do we determine whether a 5-ish year-old is ready right now or soon will become ready to be ready for kindergarten or, in some cases, competitive for admission to a demanding private school? Is this particular fledgling learner prepared to withstand the pressures, interpersonal stresses, academic expectations, and overall rigors of life in a particular kindergarten? Will she or he be able to perform in alien settings: the bus stop, the bus, the classroom, the school toilets, and the lunchroom, to say nothing of the judgmental playgrounds? These questions have long perturbed puzzled parents, educators, and nervous policymakers.

Traditionally, having a birthday that “makes the cutoff” has been the number one passkey for entry into kindergarten. But child development specialists, pediatricians, and early educators have long concurred that kids have more than just their birth certificates to attest to their ripeness. It is the other indicators that are worthy of continuing scrutiny as we decide whether to schedule a timely kindergarten launch or hold back for another year.

Results of Developmental or Readiness Testing

There exist numerous kindergarten readiness tests, including one I developed called the Pediatric Examination of Educational Readiness - PEER (Educators Publishing Service, Cambridge, Mass.). Most of these assessments place a heavy emphasis on motor skills and spatial abilities (copying designs, constructing with blocks) with a smattering of vocabulary - probably because these abilities are the easiest to observe and score in this age group. But are they the most salient and predictive functions to be evaluating? Probably not. Sure enough, these tests (including mine) don’t do a great job of forecasting how a child will be faring in 3^rd or 4^th grade, and beyond; that’s what really counts. What difference does it make if a child gets off to a slow start in kindergarten as long as she or he is performing at grade level a few years later? The primary reason for this shortcoming is that the tests don’t or maybe can’t measure the functions likely to pay off academically in the longer run.

Capacities that Count

Here is a rendering of the arenas of performance we really should be looking at in determining if a child can boast of true “readiness”:

· Pre-academic Skills: Can this child recognize and spell some basic (simple) words, recite the alphabet, form letters with reasonable legibility and ease? Very importantly and often neglected, is she or he acquiring so-called “basic number sense”? [Please refer to the Bringing Up Minds Learning module on Elementary School Mathematics.]

· Some Questions Focusing on Four Key Neurodevelopmental Areas:

o Attentional Strength – Can this kid stay focused long enough? Can he control impulses, delay gratification, filter out distractions, and complete tasks adequately for his or her age? Is he able to tolerate some boredom, a recurring feature of any school experience (from kindergarten through law school)?

o Language Abilities (Receptive and Expressive) – Is this child able to process incoming words and sentences? How good is she at expressing herself, describing events in her life, and re-telling/summarizing stories or jokes? Does she seem to be accurate with language sounds, phonological awareness, (rhyming, distinguishing between similar-sounding words, such as “bowl” and “ball.”)? Does she chronically mispronounce certain words?

o Sequencing – Does this preschooler have any trouble with everyday sequences, such as the alphabet, days of the week, time vocabulary (i.e., before-after, yesterday- today, now-later)? Does he experience problems handling multistep directions?

o Social Cognition – Does this child relate effectively to other kids within her age range? Has she formed some durable friendships? Can she function well as part of a play group? Is she able to resolve conflicts with other children (including siblings) without typically resorting to aggression or withdrawal?

Hidden Abilities or Inabilities

There are certain critical brain functions that come to dominate the learning scene later in elementary or even secondary school. Included are various components of memory, higher language abilities, abstract thinking, creativity, reasoning, and concept formation. Thus, a young child may have potential problems in one or more of these domains that will not reveal itself on preschool testing or observation. Conversely, a kid may possess undetected strengths in one or more of these areas, which may be masked by difficulties with attention or language or sequencing. She may turn out to be the very model of a “late bloomer,” coming into her own when her strengths have their chance to perform. Moreover, a child may harbor a brain specialty, an as yet unrecognized talent (say in music, cartooning, computers, wrestling, or poetry writing) that someday will make its public debut. Kids’ minds are moving targets. Such specialized minds may be under-rated on tests for kindergarten readiness or private school admissions, which tend to value and reward “well roundedness” (a highly debatable virtue). It’s fact that many if not most successful students and adults are anything but well rounded; they live with conspicuous holes and bulges.

Priming the Functions

Minds are forever undergoing reconstruction. Parents can work toward enhancing critical readiness functions and others. Here are a few examples: visits to the supermarket are terrific opportunities to build number sense (counting oranges, comparing quantities of milk or butter, calculating costs). Restaurants provide a chance to read menus and again do some mathematical heavy lifting. Automobile travel can be exploited to infuse some priming of spatial thinking (like navigational skills and left-right discrimination).

Memory and language are two areas of mind growth worth priming on a daily basis. Language production is especially germane. Preschoolers need constant practice summarizing and elaborating verbally. They should be urged always to talk in complete sentences and they should be discouraged from using cognitively lethal nouns like “stuff” and “thing.” Receptive language (and literacy) can be cultivated by reading to a child frequently. Some kids even benefit from hearing the same stories repeatedly – nothing’s wrong with that practice.

Honing and lubricating memory gears ought to be a priority as well. Parents should help kids develop both convergent memory (posing questions calling for only one possible correct answer – “what state do we live in?”) and divergent memory (questions allowing for multiple possible responses – “how many different animals can you name in one minute?”). Rapid naming is especially useful, as it primes vocabulary, word finding, and memory. During a trip, a kid can be challenged to name in one minute as many objects as he can that he views out the car window.

The Bringing Up Minds website will be offering more advice on the parental priming of readiness in our future Knowledge Bursts and Cultivators.

Some Additional Considerations

At all cost, schools and parents should refrain from using the term “immature.” This too readily invoked “diagnosis” has set back many a child. Kids with language difficulties, social skill deficiencies, and attentional problems have been held back or rejected from a school, as these conditions have been mislabeled as “immaturity.” So-called “immaturity” is impossible to assess, so it should never be used to justify inaction, exclusion, or the holding back of a young mind. The word should be banned in schools!

A range of both frivolous and valid considerations also influence school readiness decisions. In some communities, parents may want to hold back a child so that he can amass an extra year of physical growth and thus have a better crack at making the football or basketball team in high school.

When in doubt a parent and school may decide to allow a questionably ready kid go to kindergarten with the understanding that he may need to be repeat the year. Once this decision is made, I would urge parents to let the child know at the start of the first year in kindergarten that he may be remaining there for two years, so he doesn’t see that action as a failure or setback if and when it is needed. All such decisions should be influenced by the availability of alternative educational resources or the lack of them. This obviously will vary dramatically from community to community and even kindergarten teacher to kindergarten teacher. Parents may need help diagnosing schools.

Finally, it isn’t just the child who has to be ready for kindergarten. What about parental readiness to support a child ascending the formal educational ladder? Even though we disparage the concept of an immature child, perhaps we can diagnose a condition called “immature parent syndrome.” Do we need a developmental readiness test for parents? We do. In the meantime, the Bringing Up Minds website will keep on striving to prepare mothers, fathers, and grandparents, so they can be ready to share meaningfully in a child’s educational challenges.