2.+Cognitive+Academic+Factors

**Optimizing Student Cognitive Development and Learning** **In an Age of Technological Enthusiasm **  The promise of technology enhanced teaching tools, the availability of finger tip knowledge, and the anytime-anywhere-anyone connectedness of futuristic learning communities have many educators envisioning virtual schools and simulated learning ecologies as the answer to our failing school systems. Enhanced technology tools will allow for greater personalization and differentiation of student learning opportunities. Open learning forums will provide further opportunity for all learners to access educational experiences. However, is the constant and instant communication, multi-tasking, gaming, immersion in 3D simulated worlds, and constant surfing of The Web to be celebrated without some caution? As educational leaders, parents, and concerned community members, how do we make wise decisions for developing learners in regards to utilizing technology in our schools and in our homes? What factors should be considered in finding a healthy balance of real physical, sensory, and interpersonal experiences and those available to our youth in virtual environments? The technological breakthroughs fueling flights of fantasy in education have also accelerated research in neuropsychology. The irony is that the impact of new and rapidly changing technology use on our brains outpaces our ability to explore and measure it in a timely fashion for proactive decision making about the prudent use of technology at different developmental periods. In our enthusiasm for the promise of what technology may mean for learners, we may be thwarting the cognitive, physical, and social-emotional skills we need to be fully functional human beings. We may be changing what is means to be human.

Cognition and learning occur in our brains due to an amazing constellation of neural relationships and functions. Charles Nelson and Floyd Bloom are neuroscientists who have examined neural plasticity and the critical role of experience in healthy neural development (1997). When we are born we have a temporary over-production of synapses dispersed within a relatively wide area of our brains (Sapolsky, 2002). If certain of these, especially those that are related to the senses (hearing, sight, touch), are not stimulated by real experiences with the environment during temporally sensitive times, they are pruned. A lack of sensory experiences at critical times may result in long term effects from early deprivation. This is true in developing skills such as visual depth perception as well as phonemic awareness and the ability to discriminate sounds. Infancy through eight to ten years of age is a crucial period for sensory stimulation from interaction with the environment.

These studies are important to consider when parenting and teaching young learners. Children need to move, touch, taste, smell, feel, hear, and play in a richly textured real environment to insure dendritic connections are being formed during these critical neural organizational periods. Educational experiences should be robust in their sensory stimulation and in their contextual exposure of children to a wide array of information about the world they live in.

At the Stanford University Virtual Lab, Dr. Clifford Nass is exploring how technological multitasking and virtual experiences change us (as cited in Gorlick, 2009). The results of his studies suggest that virtual experiences and gaming may cause the amygdale, part of the limbic system that registers fear and aggression in the brain, to create an adrenalin rush which in turn creates powerful emotionally laden memory traces. This effect may enhance the learning of content information as in a future history geo-immersion for secondary students, however for young children, it has been shown that some virtual memories cannot be discriminated from reality based experiential memories. Children who "swam with whales” in a virtual environment thought that they actually had done so! (Gorlick, 2009)

The implications of these findings suggest that for elementary age children, virtual experiences should be mediated and interpreted by an adult. Judith Van Evra has researched the effects of television on child development for many years. In her third edition of //Television and Child Development// (2004) Van Evra expands her research endeavors to all forms of electronic digital transmissions. What she concludes is that the effects of engaging in electronic media are determined by the amount of knowledge and information the child has about reality. From the ages of 3 to 8 years, if media //becomes// the source of information for that child, they may then //see the virtual as realistic//, its relevance and importance to them increased in inverse relation to the amount of contextual real-life experience that they have (Van Evra, 2004). It becomes imperative that virtual experiences be interpreted to young children, and for some this may mean throughout their elementary experience.

Gary Small, MD at UCLA has been researching the use of the internet on our brains. Initially his conclusions about enhanced dendrite connections in the pre-frontal cortex, the area of the brain utilized in focus, decision-making, and judgment, was celebrated as evidence of a positive effect (Small & Vorgan, 2008). But in subsequent interviews and analysis he has raised questions of whether this effect is better or actually evidence of brain strain and fatigue. Power naps, REM sleep, and alternating digital tasks with others may mitigate such technological burnout (Small & Vorgan, 2008). Further brain research with adolescents reveals that the prefrontal cortex is not fully developed during early adolescence. Because of increased hormone-driven desires for intense interpersonal connections during this developmental time, adolescents are at greater risk to the dangers posed by current technology such as social-networking (Miller et al., 2009, p. 30).

In his work on multitasking, Dr. Nass and his research partners, Eyal Ophir and Anthony Wagner, report that individuals whose brains are constantly bombarded by stimulation and who flit from task to task actually demonstrate no positive benefits. Instead, multitaskers have poor attention, decreased cognitive flexibility when required to switch between tasks, and have difficulty managing their memory (as cited in Gorlick, 2009).

Sherry Turkle, psychologist and director of MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self, explores the impact increased use of technology has on our very humanness. In her book, //Alone Together,// Dr. Turkle suggests that “What technology makes easy is not always what nurtures the human spirit” (PBS Frontline, 2010). Constant technological connectivity is not the equivalent of intimacy, and that social-networking, texting, twittering, and phoning all create the “illusion of companionship without the risks or demands of relationships.” Ultimately, without the opportunity to practice the reciprocity of real human interactions children and adolescents may miss developmental opportunities to experience the wide range of human emotions. Individuals may avoid frustration, rejection, fear, and disappointment protected by the façade of a virtual reality but they also do not experience genuine vulnerability, openness, and intimacy. And if a measure of emotional maturity is self-regulation, real experience is the only way children develop and grow in this domain.  21st Century learners will still – perhaps more than ever – need to exercise their neural muscle with quiet reflective thinking. 21st Century life-long-learners will need these higher level cognitive skills more than ever to analyze and synthesize and filter the vast amount of information they will have available to them. It is excellent that the neuroscience research is also showing that neural plasticity, the amazing ability of the brain to grow new synaptic connections and re-wire itself, continues throughout all of the stages of a life-time. So it could be said that we remain developmental throughout our lives (Schwartz & Begley 2002).

For all of us, then, the question is what do we value? What do we wish to stimulate our brains with? What neural functions to we wish to potentiate and put into powerful memory traces. Will we succumb to the seduction of virtual worlds and allow the real experiences and real relationships of our existence to languish? Or will we proceed with wisdom and caution in choosing wisely the best of technological enhancement while staying firmly connected to the rich sensory experiences – though often less than perfect – reality of our every days?