The widespread adoption of digital technology in schools, starting around 2010, has led to a decline in cognitive capabilities across younger generations, a trend that contradicts historical educational progress.
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Thank you guys. Name is uh Dr. Jared
Cooney Horvath. I'm a former teacher
turned cognitive neuroscientist who
focuses on human learning. Um and I do
not receive funding nor have I ever from
big tech. Um
so a sad fact our generation has to face
this. Our kids are less cognitively
capable than we were at their age. Um
since we've been standardizing and
measuring cognitive development since
the late 1800s, every generation has
outperformed their parents. And that's
exactly what we want. We want sharper
kids. And the reason for this largely
has been school. Each generation spends
more time in school. We use school to
develop our cognition. Congratulations.
You see your correlation. Until Gen Z.
Gen Z is the first generation in modern
history to underperform us on basically
every cognitive measure we have from
basic attention to memory to literacy to
numeracy to executive functioning to
even general IQ even though they go to
more school than we did. So why? What
happened? What happened around 2010 that
decoupled schooling from cognitive
development? It can't be schools.
Schools basically look the same. It
can't be biology. This has had enough of
time to change. The answer appears to be
the tools we are using within schools to
drive that learning. across 80
countries. As Gan was just saying, if
you look at the data, once countries
adopt digital technology widely in
schools, performance goes down
significantly to the point where kids
who use computers about 5 hours per day
in school for learning purposes will
score over twothirds of a standard
deviation less than kids who rarely or
never touch tech at school. And that's
across 80 countries. Bring it home to
the US. Let's go to the US. We have our
NA. That's our big data. Take any state.
Here's here's a fun experiment you can
try. Take any state NAPE data, compare
that to when that state adopted onetoone
technology widely and watch what
happens. The NAPE data will plateau and
then start to drop. Now, as Jean said,
of course, this is all correlative. What
we really want is causitive. To get
causation, what you need is academic
research and you need mechanisms,
explanations for why we're seeing what
we're seeing. Luckily, we have academic
research stretching back to 1962 that
shows the exact same story for 60 years.
When tech enters education, learning
goes down. In fact, one of the biggest
um ed psychologists right now, Dylan
William out of the UK, recently said,
"Edte is a revolution that's been coming
for 60 years, and we're going to have to
wait another 60 because it ain't doing anything."
anything."
Now, that's research, but now we need
mechanisms. Luckily, over the last about
two decades, we've been doing a lot of
work in what we call the science of
learning. How do human beings learn? And
we now have the clear understanding of
why tech does not work for learning. And
it is all biological. It's not that the
tech isn't being used well enough. We
haven't been trained enough. We need
better programs. It's we have evolved
biologically to learn from other human
beings, not from screens. And screens
circumvent that process. I won't go too
deeply into the mechanisms. They can get
boring, but just know they're there if
you want to talk about them. So that
leaves us with two options. Option one,
when you know something is wrong, do
better. So we could just say, hey, may a
culpa, get some of this tech out of
schools, go back to what we know works,
some analog methods. Cool.
Or two, we could redefine our terms. We
could redefine what it means to be an
effective learner. I want to end with
one quick story here. Think back to your
childhood, to your schooling. I
guarantee all of us at one point took a
test on reading comprehension. And the
way it looked is this. Here's a passage
of about 750 words. Here are 10 to 12
questions about that passage. Most of
them are inferential, not factual.
They're asking you to go beyond what you
just read to see what you understood.
Cool. Last year, the SATs had a reading
comprehension section. Here's what it
looked like. Here is a single sentence
of 75 words. Here is one question
fact-based about that that sentence.
Next. Here is another sentence of 75
words. Here is one question about that
sentence. Next. Last year, they
redefined reading comprehension to mean
54 short sentences with one question
about each. That is skimming. That's not
reading. Why would we ever do that?
Because what do kids do on computers?
They skim. So rather than determining
what do we want our children to do and
gearing education towards that, we are
redefining education to better suit the
tool. That's not progress, that is
surrender. So as we go through our
discussion today, there's going to be a
lot of talk about smartphones and and
social media, rightly so. But I'm the
voice here to remind you that even in
schools, it doesn't matter what the size
of the screen is. if it's a if it's a a
phone, if it's a laptop, if it's a
desktop, and it doesn't matter who
bought it. Is it school sanctioned? Does
it have the word education stamped on
it? It doesn't matter. All of these
things are also going to hurt learning,
which in turn are going to hurt our
kids' cognitive development right at the
time when we need our kids to be sharper
than we are. So, thank you guys so much
for today. I look forward to talking
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