Impact of Technology on Learning

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 is 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 school.

Schools basically look the same. It can't be biology.

This hasn't 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 Gene 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 five hours per day in school for learning purposes will score over

two-thirds 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 NAEP. That's our big data.

Take any state. Here's, here's a fun experiment you can try.

Take any state NAEP data, compare that to when that state

adopted one-to-one technology widely, and watch what happens.

The NAEP data will plateau and then start to drop.

Now, as Gene said, of course, this is all correlative.

What we really want is causative. 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, "Ed tech is a revolution that's been coming for 60

years, and we're gonna have to wait another 60

'cause it ain't doing anything."

N-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 wanna 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, mea 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 wanna 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 gonna 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 l-- 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 gonna hurt learning, which

in turn are gonna 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 with you all