What television and the Internet is doing to our kids?
September 19, 2008 by grzegorz.piechota
Do you try to catch young readers and convince them to read a newspaper? Bad news from scientists: the Digital Age can stupefy the youngsters and jeopardize our future.
In the Chronicle of Higher Education’ article Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, cites research on reading online and analyses its impact on learning skills of children:
”A decade ago, [Jakob Nielsen, a Web researcher] issued an ‘alert’ entitled ‘How Users Read on the Web.’ It opened bluntly: ‘They don’t.’
In the eye-tracking test, only one in six subjects read Web pages linearly, sentence by sentence. The rest jumped around chasing keywords, bullet points, visuals, and color and typeface variations. In another experiment on how people read e-newsletters, informational e-mail messages, and news feeds, Nielsen exclaimed, ‘Reading is not even the right word.’ The subjects usually read only the first two words in headlines, and they ignored the introductory sections. They wanted the ‘nut’ and nothing else.
A 2003 Nielsen warning asserted that a PDF file strikes users as a ‘content blob,’ and they won’t read it unless they print it out. A “booklike” page on screen, it seems, turns them off and sends them away.
Another Nielsen test found that teenagers skip through the Web even faster than adults do, but with a lower success rate for completing tasks online (55 percent compared to 66 percent). Nielsen writes: ‘Teens have a short attention span and want to be stimulated. That’s also why they leave sites that are difficult to figure out.’ For them, the Web isn’t a place for reading and study and knowledge. It spells the opposite.”
Professor Bauerlein, an author of a book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30), thinks that Nielsens’ research projects help explain ”one of the great disappointments of education in our time” – the huge investment schools have made in technology.
”Ever since the Telecommunications Act of 1996, money has poured into public-school classrooms. At the same time, colleges have raced to out-technologize one another. But while enthusiasm swells, e-bills are passed, smart classrooms multiply, and students cheer — the results keep coming back negative.
When the Texas Education Agency evaluated its Technology Immersion Pilot, a $14-million program to install wireless tools in middle schools, the conclusion was unequivocal: ‘There were no statistically significant effects of immersion in the first year on either reading or mathematics achievement.’
When University of Chicago economists evaluated California schools before and after federal technology subsidies (the E-Rate program) had granted 30 percent more schools in the state Internet access, they determined that ‘the additional investments in technology generated by E-Rate had no immediate impact on meas-ured student outcomes.’
In March 2007, the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance evaluated 16 award-winning education technologies and found that ‘test scores were not significantly higher in classrooms using selected reading and mathematics software products.’
Last spring a New York State school district decided to drop its laptop program after years of offering it. The school-board president announced why: ‘After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none.’”
What are the dangers?
”This is not so much about the content students prefer — Facebook, YouTube, etc. — or whether they use the Web for homework or not. It is about the reading styles they employ. They race across the surface, dicing language and ideas into bullets and graphics, seeking what they already want and shunning the rest. They convert history, philosophy, literature, civics, and fine art into information, material to retrieve and pass along.
That’s the drift of screen reading. Yes, it’s a kind of literacy, but it breaks down in the face of a dense argument, a Modernist poem, a long political tract, and other texts that require steady focus and linear attention — in a word, slow reading. Fast scanning doesn’t foster flexible minds that can adapt to all kinds of texts, and it doesn’t translate into academic reading.”
It is an argument for newspapers to expand the N.I.E. projects, as the World Association of Newspapers suggests. Not because it is a way to increase circulation etc. but because it will make our kids smarter.
But scanning is not the only problem of today’s children. Reading any stories, including those in newspapers, needs imagination.
Unfortunately, as Jonah Lehrer of the Boston Globe writes, TV watching affects young generation’s capabilities:
”Many scientists argue that daydreaming is a crucial tool for creativity, a thought process that allows the brain to make new associations and connections…
The ability to think abstractly that flourishes during daydreams also has important social benefits. Mostly, what we daydream about is each other, as the mind retrieves memories, contemplates “what if” scenarios, and thinks about how it should behave in the future…
After monitoring the daily schedule of the children for several months, [Teresa] Belton [a research associate at East Anglia University in England] came to the conclusion that their lack of imagination was, at least in part, caused by the absence of ‘empty time,’ or periods without any activity or sensory stimulation. She noticed that as soon as these children got even a little bit bored, they simply turned on the television: the moving images kept their minds occupied. ‘It was a very automatic reaction,’ she says. ‘Television was what they did when they didn’t know what else to do.’
The problem with this habit, Belton says, is that it kept the kids from daydreaming. Because the children were rarely bored – at least, when a television was nearby – they never learned how to use their own imagination as a form of entertainment. ‘The capacity to daydream enables a person to fill empty time with an enjoyable activity that can be carried on anywhere,’ Belton says. ‘But that’s a skill that requires real practice. Too many kids never get the practice.’ ”
Tagged: internet, newspaper, television, young readers
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