Media and Attention, Cognition, and School Achievement

Just reading the summary of the article brings to mind something I heard on a news story from the AP wires within the last 2 weeks: a person's IQ actually decreases the more they utilize technology to keep up with current events. In one way I believe this - stories taken to their smallest component and shot out over the internet or AP never give you a full picture, or follow up, so what you think you know, probably hasn't been corrected yet. I know I hear a lot of stories that don't have a point, or how the story turned out. In another way I believe this because there is absolute overload. I can get RSS feeds, news from all over the world, with Yahoo and AP being the 2 biggest sources for me, as well as most people, at least the ones I have talked to. I in some ways do not believe this, because knowledge is power, and the more you know, the more you can use and integrate. Yet there are times that I feel very overwhelmed trying to keep up with what is going on. This goes along with the studies that suggest a threshold of TV hours watched - up to a point it's beneficial, and then it becomes detrimental over that point.

I just love the way the article takes all the studies done about TV, but then can't draw any real conclusions because they all seem to contradict each other. So what the threshold is has to be different for each child, and based on several factors, just like every study. My great-grandmother used to say, "everything in moderation; too much of everything isn't good." She was talking food, of course, but those studies have been done, too.

So like with any stimuli for a child, it depends on the point they are in their social, developmental and cognitive development as to whether they get anything out of any type of media or not. In cognitive development we learned that students remember about 1/3 of what you teach; and that they do most of their transfer of knowledge at night during deep sleep, when the hippocampus processes the data into long term memory. So we, as teachers, "feed the hippo" on a daily basis.

This article just confirmed for me that I have to use every resource at my disposal to teach the students, because you don't know what may click with a child.