Replies to post #124536 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[PegnVA]

Interesting article. Reasons for a decrease in college students critical thinking, making a written argument skills, and review conflicting reporting must also take into account that some college students are simply not equipped (intelectlually) to be in college. To offset this seemingly increasing dilema, colleges now offer remedial courses rather than refuse admission.
IMO, college courses taken/not taken is only part of a student's ability/lack thereof to think critically.

[F6]

"Academically Adrift": Are American college kids falling behind?


iStockphoto

An expert explains why students today work and learn less than previous generations -- and what we can do about it

By Adele Melander-Dayton
Sunday, Feb 6, 2011 14:05 ET

Americans are more anxious about education than we have been in decades. Documentaries like 2010's "Waiting For Superman" grapple with a public education system in crisis: overcrowding in classrooms, unmotivated students and the rising cost of a college education. Studies like the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) rank American students much lower academically than their Korean or Finnish peers, so much so that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan felt compelled to tell the New York Times: "We have to see this as a wake-up call -- The United States came in 23rd or 24th in most subjects. We can quibble, or we can face the brutal truth that we're being out-educated."

So far, the debate about U.S. education has focused on primary and secondary schools. But what if the downward trend in learning extends into the echelons of higher education? That's what Richard Arum argues in "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses [ http://search.barnesandnoble.com/books/product.aspx?r=1&isbn=9780226028569 ]." Arum, a sociology and education professor at New York University, wrote the book with University of Virginia sociology professor Josipa Roksa, and they say an increasing number of undergraduates are moving through college without working particularly hard, and without learning key skills like complex reasoning and critical thinking. Using the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test, as well as transcripts and self-reports from students, Arum and Roksa assembled disturbing data that reflects declining academic rigor across the board: at state universities, research institutions, liberal arts colleges, even highly selective schools.

Salon sat down with Richard Arum at his NYU office to find out if higher education is really in trouble.

*

The book is called "Academically Adrift." What do you mean by that?

We use that term in two different ways: The schools themselves are academically adrift -- they've lost their focus on their core mission of undergraduate education. Colleges and universities are doing lots of great things today -- advancing knowledge, helping the economy, producing pharmacological patents and prime-time athletics. They're not focused on educating students. We also argue that large numbers of students today are moving through college and university academically adrift. They end up with college degrees that have too little substance to them, because they've been able to identify pathways through college that have asked very little of them academically.

College is a prerequisite now in all sorts of fields. There's less emphasis on trade schools and junior colleges, and it's increasingly expected that if you finish high school you'll go to a four-year college. Do you think that's part of the trend of learning declining in college?

I think it's a mistake to attribute the patterns we identify in the book to increased access. It's absolutely true that today's high school students overwhelmingly report that they plan to go to college. What hasn't expanded dramatically is the actual number of students attending four-year colleges. In the '60s and '70s there was a great expansion in the number of kids going to four-year colleges. From 1980 on, it's been relatively flat, or on a slight increase in college access. Today there's a lot of rhetoric about "college for all," and there has been an increase in students going to two-year colleges in particular. But the increase in four-year colleges is much less than people imagine. The total percentage of students that end up with four-year degrees is still hovering around 30 percent.

What made you want to write a book about declining learning standards in the first place? Is this something you've noticed first-hand?

I did not go into this study wanting to write a book about declining learning standards, or even have it as a working hypothesis. I'm a lifelong educator and today also a social scientist. My prior work is in K-12 education. We know a lot about how K-12 education works and what factors and characteristics are associated with learning. We have not had similar studies in higher education. The opportunity arose to follow college kids longitudinally with a similar research design, where you measure them repeatedly on test score performance, and also survey them and collect their transcripts to create a data set like the ones existing in K-12 education. That was our interest.

So you didn't expect to find what you did?

No. Absolutely not. It took a while for us to see these patterns in the data and understand the meaning of the results and the student reports.

What were some of your findings?

Fifty percent of the kids in a typical semester say they haven't taken a single course where they've been asked to write 20 pages over the course of the semester. And 32 percent have not taken a single class the prior semester for which they've been asked to read more than 40 pages per week on average, and in terms of homework, 35 percent of them say they do five or fewer hours per week studying alone.

After the New York Times [ http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/academically-adrift/ ] wrote about your book, many online commenters took exception to those findings, though. They said, "I'm a math major, or I'm a physics major, of course I don't read 40 pages per week. I do problem sets." Do you think the study is biased towards liberal arts majors?

Most people expect college students regardless of major to develop these higher-order skills through reading and writing. That's why colleges and universities have core requirements that every student must take no matter what their major is. It's absolutely the case that different majors have different reading and writing requirements, but they should be experiencing these sorts of academics in some place in their course schedule. Interestingly, that critique also doesn't hold because math and science majors are doing quite well. They're studying a lot of hours and they demonstrate higher rates of learning

There's also been some criticism of the College Learning Assessment (CLA), the standardized test used to evaluate the students. Some in the blogosphere have argued that it favors liberal arts students. Can you explain how the CLA works?

The CLA gives the kids a performance task -- a set of six or seven documents where they're asked to think critically about what's in the documents, synthesize the information, and write a task based on this information. The specific tasks that they're asked to do are ones that a college graduate might experience in the labor market. It's not a reductionist multiple-choice test but an authentic measure of kids' ability to think and communicate. Let me say though, all standardized measurements are by definition imperfect and limited. The CLA also doesn't attempt to measure subject-specific skills. However, the power of our work is that we're not simply looking at the CLA measure and inferring the state of undergraduate education from that. We also looked at their transcripts and their self-reports of what they're experiencing in their classes. Some of the reception has attempted to just look at the CLA and find faults with that, but every test score is imperfect. Coupled with student's self-reports of their limited academic demands, they tell a very powerful story.

I graduated from a highly selective liberal arts college in 2007. As I read the book, I thought, "Wow, this really wasn't my experience. If I didn't do my reading in college, and if I didn't study a certain amount, it definitely showed in my grades and class discussion." I found this to be true of most students at my school.

We argue in the book that findings do vary across the board. Some colleges and universities do a better job at requiring academic rigor and have demonstrated learning on this measure. As sociologists, we're very interested in peer effects. We found the more selective the college is in terms of the entering test scores, those academic environments tend to be more rigorous. Kids take courses where they're asked to do a bit more in terms of reading and writing, they study more hours, and they demonstrate greater gains. However, in all the colleges and universities we looked at, we found some kids applying themselves and learning, and we still found large pockets at even the most selective colleges where that wasn't occurring.

What's the reason you don't identify the schools in the study?

It is standard social science practice to maintain the confidentiality of your research sites and of the participants.

Are low levels of learning in college really a new phenomenon? "Animal House" came out in 1978. The academically challenged George W. Bush graduated from Yale in 1968, and even JFK's application to Harvard, which was recently released online, is kind of appalling.

There's a longstanding tradition of some students going through college with little asked of them and little learned. Nothing is new about that. However, there is significant evidence out there that something has changed in terms of the academic rigor and student workload. Two labor economists, Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks, went back and looked at all the survey data all the way back to the 1920s. Full-time college students were asked, "How much are you studying and preparing for class?" From 1920 to 1960 it's relatively flat. And then something happens in the '60s going forward where it drops in half. Full-time college students spend 50 percent less time studying than they did several decades ago. We also know that in terms of grades, students expect to receive higher grades and do receive higher grades in spite of less effort.

What are the consequences, then, of a generation of college graduates who aren't as well-educated as their predecessors, or their peers abroad?

The environment that kids face has changed. They're going into an increasingly globalized economic system. Even if you have subject-specific skills, the labor market is so uncertain that people are increasingly moving from job to job as adults. You need to have developed these higher order skills: critical thinking, complex reasoning and the ability to communicate in writing. If you haven't, you're going to be at a lifelong disadvantage in the economy. Equally or more troubling, if you're graduating large numbers of kids that have not developed critical thinking and complex reasoning, how are they going to function as democratic citizens?

The last chapter of the book is called "Mandate for Reform." What are your suggestions to fix these problems?

A one-size-fits-all federally imposed accountability system like exists in K-12 education would be a huge mistake. It would be counterproductive. It would have unintended negative consequences. Rather, we call for greater institutional and individual responsibility at lower levels in the system. These problems are solvable. Greater academic rigor, faculty coming together and deciding that courses should have greater rigor in terms of reading and writing and hours spent studying. It's not clear to me that the stakeholders in the system today -- administrators, faculty and students -- have prioritized undergraduate learning. I don't think it's going to happen automatically. We're very skeptical that anything is going to change without some exogenous shock to the system.

What do you think that shock to the system would have to be?

In the conclusion of the book, we give the Sputnik example, which President Obama also used recently. The Sputnik launch shocked the system to focus more on math and science instruction in particular, and improved those areas. I think it's going to require something similar to that kind of awakening for American society to pay attention to this.

Copyright ©2011 Salon Media Group, Inc.

http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/02/06/academically_adrift_interview/index.html [comments at http://letters.salon.com/mwt/feature/2011/02/06/academically_adrift_interview/view/?show=all ]

[F6]

Your So-Called Education


Sublime Ridiculous

By RICHARD ARUM and JOSIPA ROKSA
Published: May 14, 2011

COMMENCEMENT is a special time on college campuses: an occasion for students, families, faculty and administrators to come together to celebrate a job well done. And perhaps there is reason to be pleased. In recent surveys of college seniors, more than 90 percent report gaining subject-specific knowledge and developing the ability to think critically and analytically. Almost 9 out of 10 report that overall, they were satisfied with their collegiate experiences.

We would be happy to join in the celebrations if it weren’t for our recent research, which raises doubts about the quality of undergraduate learning in the United States. Over four years, we followed the progress of several thousand students in more than two dozen diverse four-year colleges and universities. We found that large numbers of the students were making their way through college with minimal exposure to rigorous coursework, only a modest investment of effort and little or no meaningful improvement in skills like writing and reasoning.

In a typical semester, for instance, 32 percent of the students did not take a single course with more than 40 pages of reading per week, and 50 percent did not take any course requiring more than 20 pages of writing over the semester. The average student spent only about 12 to 13 hours per week studying — about half the time a full-time college student in 1960 spent studying, according to the labor economists Philip S. Babcock and Mindy S. Marks.

Not surprisingly, a large number of the students showed no significant progress on tests of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing that were administered when they began college and then again at the ends of their sophomore and senior years. If the test that we used, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, were scaled on a traditional 0-to-100 point range, 45 percent of the students would not have demonstrated gains of even one point over the first two years of college, and 36 percent would not have shown such gains over four years of college.

Why is the overall quality of undergraduate learning so poor?

While some colleges are starved for resources, for many others it’s not for lack of money. Even at those colleges where for the past several decades tuition has far outpaced the rate of inflation, students are taught by fewer full-time tenured faculty members while being looked after by a greatly expanded number of counselors who serve an array of social and personal needs. At the same time, many schools are investing in deluxe dormitory rooms, elaborate student centers and expensive gyms. Simply put: academic investments are a lower priority.

The situation reflects a larger cultural change in the relationship between students and colleges. The authority of educators has diminished, and students are increasingly thought of, by themselves and their colleges, as “clients” or “consumers.” When 18-year-olds are emboldened to see themselves in this manner, many look for ways to attain an educational credential effortlessly and comfortably. And they are catered to accordingly. The customer is always right.

Federal legislation has facilitated this shift. The funds from Pell Grants and subsidized loans, by being assigned to students to spend on academic institutions they have chosen rather than being packaged as institutional grants for colleges to dispense, have empowered students — for good but also for ill. And expanded privacy protections have created obstacles for colleges in providing information on student performance to parents, undercutting a traditional check on student lassitude.

Fortunately, there are some relatively simple, practical steps that colleges and universities could take to address the problem. Too many institutions, for instance, rely primarily on student course evaluations to assess teaching. This creates perverse incentives for professors to demand little and give out good grades. (Indeed, the 36 percent of students in our study who reported spending five or fewer hours per week studying alone still had an average G.P.A. of 3.16.) On those commendable occasions when professors and academic departments do maintain rigor, they risk declines in student enrollments. And since resources are typically distributed based on enrollments, rigorous classes are likely to be canceled and rigorous programs shrunk. Distributing resources and rewards based on student learning instead of student satisfaction would help stop this race to the bottom.

Others involved in education can help, too. College trustees, instead of worrying primarily about institutional rankings and fiscal concerns, could hold administrators accountable for assessing and improving learning. Alumni as well as parents and students on college tours could ignore institutional facades and focus on educational substance. And the Department of Education could make available nationally representative longitudinal data on undergraduate learning outcomes for research purposes, as it has been doing for decades for primary and secondary education.

Most of all, we hope that during this commencement season, our faculty colleagues will pause to consider the state of undergraduate learning and our collective responsibility to increase academic rigor on our campuses.

Richard Arum, a professor of sociology and education at New York University, and Josipa Roksa, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, are the authors of “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.”

© 2011 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/opinion/15arum.html

[fuagf]

The Myth of Multitasking

Christine Rosen

In one of the many letters he wrote to his son in the 1740s, Lord Chesterfield offered the following advice: “There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.” To Chesterfield, singular focus was not merely a practical way to structure one’s time; it was a mark of intelligence. “This steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind.”

In modern times, hurry, bustle, and agitation have become a regular way of life for many people—so much so that we have embraced a word to describe our efforts to respond to the many pressing demands on our time: multitasking. Used for decades to describe the parallel processing abilities of computers, multitasking is now shorthand for the human attempt to do simultaneously as many things as possible, as quickly as possible, preferably marshalling the power of as many technologies as possible.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, one sensed a kind of exuberance about the possibilities of multitasking. Advertisements for new electronic gadgets—particularly the first generation of handheld digital devices—celebrated the notion of using technology to accomplish several things at once. The word multitasking began appearing in the “skills” sections of résumés, as office workers restyled themselves as high-tech, high-performing team players. “We have always multitasked—inability to walk and chew gum is a time-honored cause for derision—but never so intensely or self-consciously as now,” James Gleick wrote in his 1999 book Faster. .. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067977548X/the-new-atlantis-20 .. “We are multitasking connoisseurs—experts in crowding, pressing, packing, and overlapping distinct activities in our all-too-finite moments.” An article in the New York Times Magazine in 2001 asked, “Who can remember life before multitasking? These days we all do it.” The article offered advice on “How to Multitask” with suggestions about giving your brain’s “multitasking hot spot” an appropriate workout.

But more recently, challenges to the ethos of multitasking have begun to emerge. Numerous studies have shown the sometimes-fatal danger of using cell phones and other electronic devices while driving, for example, and several states have now made that particular form of multitasking illegal. In the business world, where concerns about time-management are perennial, warnings about workplace distractions spawned by a multitasking culture are on the rise. In 2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, “Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.” The psychologist who led the study called this new “infomania” a serious threat to workplace productivity. One of the Harvard Business Review’s “Breakthrough Ideas” for 2007 was Linda Stone’s notion of “continuous partial attention,” which might be understood as a subspecies of multitasking: using mobile computing power and the Internet, we are “constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing.”

Dr. Edward Hallowell, a Massachusetts-based psychiatrist who specializes in the treatment of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and has written a book with the self-explanatory title CrazyBusy, .. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345482441/the-new-atlantis-20 .. has been offering therapies to combat extreme multitasking for years; in his book he calls multitasking a “mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously.” In a 2005 article, he described a new condition, “Attention Deficit Trait,” which he claims is rampant in the business world. ADT is “purely a response to the hyperkinetic environment in which we live,” writes Hallowell, and its hallmark symptoms mimic those of ADD. “Never in history has the human brain been asked to track so many data points,” Hallowell argues, and this challenge “can be controlled only by creatively engineering one’s environment and one’s emotional and physical health.” Limiting multitasking is essential. Best-selling business advice author Timothy Ferriss also extols the virtues of “single-tasking” in his book, The 4-Hour Workweek. .. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0307353133/the-new-atlantis-20 ..

Multitasking might also be taking a toll on the economy. One study by researchers at the University of California at Irvine monitored interruptions among office workers; they found that workers took an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from interruptions such as phone calls or answering e-mail and return to their original task. Discussing multitasking with the New York Times in 2007, Jonathan B. Spira, an analyst at the business research firm Basex, estimated that extreme multitasking—information overload—costs the U.S. economy $650 billion a year in lost productivity.

Changing Our Brains

To better understand the multitasking phenomenon, neurologists and psychologists have studied the workings of the brain. In 1999, Jordan Grafman, chief of cognitive neuroscience at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (part of the National Institutes of Health), used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans to determine that when people engage in “task-switching”—that is, multitasking behavior—the flow of blood increases to a region of the frontal cortex called Brodmann area 10. (The flow of blood to particular regions of the brain is taken as a proxy indication of activity in those regions.) “This is presumably the last part of the brain to evolve, the most mysterious and exciting part,” Grafman told the New York Times in 2001—adding, with a touch of hyperbole, “It’s what makes us most human.”

It is also what makes multitasking a poor long-term strategy for learning. Other studies, such as those performed by psychologist René Marois of Vanderbilt University, have used fMRI to demonstrate the brain’s response to handling multiple tasks. Marois found evidence of a “response selection bottleneck” that occurs when the brain is forced to respond to several stimuli at once. As a result, task-switching leads to time lost as the brain determines which task to perform. Psychologist David Meyer at the University of Michigan believes that rather than a bottleneck in the brain, a process of “adaptive executive control” takes place, which “schedules task processes appropriately to obey instructions about their relative priorities and serial order,” as he described to the New Scientist. Unlike many other researchers who study multitasking, Meyer is optimistic that, with training, the brain can learn to task-switch more effectively, and there is some evidence that certain simple tasks are amenable to such practice. But his research has also found that multitasking contributes to the release of stress hormones and adrenaline, which can cause long-term health problems if not controlled, and contributes to the loss of short-term memory.

In one recent study, Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that “multitasking adversely affects how you learn. Even if you learn while multitasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.” His research demonstrates that people use different areas of the brain for learning and storing new information when they are distracted: brain scans of people who are distracted or multitasking show activity in the striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning new skills; brain scans of people who are not distracted show activity in the hippocampus, a region involved in storing and recalling information. Discussing his research on National Public Radio recently, Poldrack warned, “We have to be aware that there is a cost to the way that our society is changing, that humans are not built to work this way. We’re really built to focus. And when we sort of force ourselves to multitask, we’re driving ourselves to perhaps be less efficient in the long run even though it sometimes feels like we’re being more efficient.”

If, as Poldrack concluded, “multitasking changes the way people learn,” what might this mean for today’s children and teens, raised with an excess of new entertainment and educational technology, and avidly multitasking at a young age? Poldrack calls this the “million-dollar question.” Media multitasking—that is, the simultaneous use of several different media, such as television, the Internet, video games, text messages, telephones, and e-mail—is clearly on the rise, as a 2006 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation showed: in 1999, only 16 percent of the time people spent using any of those media was spent on multiple media at once; by 2005, 26 percent of media time was spent multitasking. “I multitask every single second I am online,” confessed one study participant. “At this very moment I am watching TV, checking my e-mail every two minutes, reading a newsgroup about who shot JFK, burning some music to a CD, and writing this message.”

The Kaiser report noted several factors that increase the likelihood of media multitasking, including “having a computer and being able to see a television from it.” Also, “sensation-seeking” personality types are more likely to multitask, as are those living in “a highly TV-oriented household.” The picture that emerges of these pubescent multitasking mavens is of a generation of great technical facility and intelligence but of extreme impatience, unsatisfied with slowness and uncomfortable with silence: “I get bored if it’s not all going at once, because everything has gaps—waiting for a website to come up, commercials on TV, etc.” one participant said. The report concludes on a very peculiar note, perhaps intended to be optimistic: “In this media-heavy world, it is likely that brains that are more adept at media multitasking will be passed along and these changes will be naturally selected,” the report states. “After all, information is power, and if one can process more information all at once, perhaps one can be more powerful.” This is techno-social Darwinism, nature red in pixel and claw.

Other experts aren’t so sure. As neurologist Jordan Grafman told Time magazine: “Kids that are instant messaging while doing homework, playing games online and watching TV, I predict, aren’t going to do well in the long run.” “I think this generation of kids is guinea pigs,” educational psychologist Jane Healy told the San Francisco Chronicle; she worries that they might become adults who engage in “very quick but very shallow thinking.” Or, as the novelist Walter Kirn suggests in a deft essay in The Atlantic, we might be headed for an “Attention-Deficit Recession.”

Paying Attention

When we talk about multitasking, we are really talking about attention: the art of paying attention, the ability to shift our attention, and, more broadly, to exercise judgment about what objects are worthy of our attention. People who have achieved great things often credit for their success a finely honed skill for paying attention. When asked about his particular genius, Isaac Newton responded that if he had made any discoveries, it was “owing more to patient attention than to any other talent.”

William James, the great psychologist, wrote at length about the varieties of human attention. In The Principles of Psychology .. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674705599/the-new-atlantis-20 .. (1890), he outlined the differences among “sensorial attention,” “intellectual attention,” “passive attention,” and the like, and noted the “gray chaotic indiscriminateness” of the minds of people who were incapable of paying attention. James compared our stream of thought to a river, and his observations presaged the cognitive “bottlenecks” described later by neurologists: “On the whole easy simple flowing predominates in it, the drift of things is with the pull of gravity, and effortless attention is the rule,” he wrote. “But at intervals an obstruction, a set-back, a log-jam occurs, stops the current, creates an eddy, and makes things temporarily move the other way.”

To James, steady attention was thus the default condition of a mature mind, an ordinary state undone only by perturbation. To readers a century later, that placid portrayal may seem alien—as though depicting a bygone world. Instead, today’s multitasking adult may find something more familiar in James’s description of the youthful mind: an “extreme mobility of the attention” that “makes the child seem to belong less to himself than to every object which happens to catch his notice.” For some people, James noted, this challenge is never overcome; such people only get their work done “in the interstices of their mind-wandering.” Like Chesterfield, James believed that the transition from youthful distraction to mature attention was in large part the result of personal mastery and discipline—and so was illustrative of character. “The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again,” he wrote, “is the very root of judgment, character, and will.”

Today, our collective will to pay attention seems fairly weak. We require advice books to teach us how to avoid distraction. In the not-too-distant future we may even employ new devices to help us overcome the unintended attention deficits created by today’s gadgets. As one New York Times article recently suggested, “Further research could help create clever technology, like sensors or smart software that workers could instruct with their preferences and priorities to serve as a high tech ‘time nanny’ to ease the modern multitasker’s plight.” Perhaps we will all accept as a matter of course a computer governor—like the devices placed on engines so that people can’t drive cars beyond a certain speed. Our technological governors might prompt us with reminders to set mental limits when we try to do too much, too quickly, all at once.

Then again, perhaps we will simply adjust and come to accept what James called “acquired inattention.” E-mails pouring in, cell phones ringing, televisions blaring, podcasts streaming—all this may become background noise, like the “din of a foundry or factory” that James observed workers could scarcely avoid at first, but which eventually became just another part of their daily routine. For the younger generation of multitaskers, the great electronic din is an expected part of everyday life. And given what neuroscience and anecdotal evidence have shown us, this state of constant intentional self-distraction could well be of profound detriment to individual and cultural well-being. When people do their work only in the “interstices of their mind-wandering,” with crumbs of attention rationed out among many competing tasks, their culture may gain in information, but it will surely weaken in wisdom.

Christine Rosen is a senior editor of The New Atlantis and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-myth-of-multitasking

See also: bits ..

Hearing Bilingual: How Babies Sort Out Language

Over the past decade, Ellen Bialystok [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/science/31conversation.html (the post to which this is a reply)], a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, has shown that bilingual children develop crucial skills in addition to their double vocabularies, learning different ways to solve logic problems or to handle multitasking, skills that are often considered part of the brain’s so-called executive function.

These higher-level cognitive abilities are localized to the frontal and prefrontal cortex in the brain. “Overwhelmingly, children who are bilingual from early on have precocious development of executive function,” Dr. Bialystok said.
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=67866835

===================
for the evolutionarily impaired, the "theory" of evolution just got a refinement due a discovery by a kid.

Closest Human Ancestor May Rewrite Steps in Our Evolution [...]

The scan revealed Au. sediba had a much smaller brain than seen in human species, with an adult version maybe only as large as a medium-size grapefruit. However, it was humanlike in several ways — for instance, its orbitofrontal region directly behind the eyes apparently expanded in ways that make it more like a human's frontal lobe in shape. This area is linked in humans with higher mental functions such as multitasking, an ability that may contribute to human capacities for long-term planning and innovative behavior.
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=66941028

===================

The Bilingual Advantage .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=63842518

Bottom line bilingual seems good which is consistent with views of 50 years ago, in there is a plus for mixing.