By PERRI KLASS, M.D.
Certain subjects make self-righteous parents of us all: our children thinking they are doing homework when in reality the text messages are flying, the Internet browsers are open, the video is streaming, the loud rock music is blaring on the turntable — oh, wait, sorry, that last one was our parents complaining about us.
Heaven knows, I understand the feeling. And not just as a pediatrician. I have my own children — a high school student, a college student and a medical student — and I know the drill.
But if you ask the experts, they are pretty unanimous that we don’t know much.
“The literature looking at media and its impact on attentional skills is just in its infancy,” said Renee Hobbs, a professor of mass media and communications at Temple University and a specialist in media literacy.
Another expert, Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington who is a leading researcher on children and the media, agreed. “The pace of science has not kept up with technology,” he told me.
And Dr. Victor C. Strasburger, a professor at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, said, “Kids are spending an extraordinary amount of time with media,” but added: “We don’t really know what they pay attention to, what they don’t. We don’t know how it impacts their school performance, whether it impacts their school performance.”
A recent and much-discussed study showed decreased productivity in adults who were multitasking — or as Dr. Christakis put it, “The truth is you don’t really multitask, you just think you do; the brain can’t process two high-level cognitive things.” What you are actually doing, he went on, is “oscillating between the two.”
So are teenagers any better at oscillating?
“It may be that multitasking is more of a problem for us old brains,” Professor Hobbs said. Dr. Christakis speculated that teenagers might have some advantages, partly because of their presumably greater mental dexterity and partly — “and this is the part we don’t understand,” he said — “because they really have come of age with these technologies.”
That generational and technological gap reflects all the unanswered questions about what it means to grow up in this era, and probably accounts for some of the bewilderment many parents feel as they watch their children navigate the many and varied connections of modern adolescence.
Parents are digital immigrants, Dr. Christakis said; children are digital natives. “In the 20th century, you worried about a digital divide separating rich from poor,” he said. “That’s narrowed, and the one that’s emerging is separating parents from their children. We’re fairly clueless about the digital world they inhabit.”
So where does all this leave parents trying to help their own digital natives develop good study habits? Harris M. Cooper, a professor of psychology at Duke who has spent many years studying homework and its effects, says it’s important to keep in mind the overarching purpose of the assignment.
“One of the things that homework is supposed to do for us is help us generalize where we feel we can learn,” he told me, adding that part of successful adult functioning is “matching the task to the context.” In other words, you have to learn how you work and under what circumstances.
So I decided to test my digital immigrant biases — which tell me that no one can study effectively while watching, listening, surfing, messaging — against my professional experience, which tells me that medical students who don’t study effectively can’t learn the huge and complex body of material they have to master, and will therefore not pass their frequent tests. In other words, I asked my son and his friends, people in their early to middle 20s who do an awful lot of studying.
These medical students did sound like expert studiers, in that they had paid close attention to the different kinds of concentration required for different tasks.
“If I’m studying to memorize,” my son told me, “I’m still usually chatting” — instant messaging, that is. “But it’s usually not real-time chatting. I’ll look up every once in a while and I’ll chat; I may have a movie going on in the background, but I’ll go for a movie I’ve already seen.”
He had even conducted an experiment: “So I did a time study where I calculated on average how many pages of a paper I could read when I had a movie on in the background versus when I didn’t. I found I could read at about 80 percent efficiency.” So the distraction was worth it; it meant he could go on reading for much longer stretches.
That question of how to keep yourself studying for long periods preoccupied other medical students. One said she did her best studying at the gym, usually on the elliptical machines; she taped the lectures and played them over at a fast speed while working out.
But you can’t work out all the time. “The day before a big test,” she said, “I usually do go to the gym and listen and work through one of the lectures that I might feel is more important, and then I would just go through everything.”
As an immigrant, I will always lack a certain fluency when it comes to the digital world. And learning how we learn, the overarching assignment that Dr. Cooper described, is one that we parents can’t complete for our children — no, not even the most hopelessly overinvolved parents, the ones who stay up all night putting together the seventh-grade biology poster. (You know who you are.)
The advice my older son gave me about my younger son was, “Don’t worry about it till there’s something to worry about. If he’s doing well in his classes and his homework, fine!” And that was also Dr. Cooper’s advice to parents: “If they’re doing well, permitting them to have some choice permits them to find their own style.”
Ah, but I thought to myself mournfully, I still feel that something is lost. What about the all-consuming pleasure of reading something, really reading something, with no distractions? And the creative complexity of writing, making language flow from sentence to sentence, listening only to your inner voice?
And then I reflected on my own work habits, and the ways I have adopted the customs of this new country, and I wondered: Is this the slightly suspect nostalgia of the immigrant for the lovely but already mythological terrain that she herself has left behind?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/health/13klas.html?ref=health&pagewanted=print
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