Education Week - November 14, 2018 - 26

COMMENTARY

The Digital Assault on Cognition

By Elias Aboujaoude
he psychological impact of
digital technology on K-12
students has been the
subject of considerable research. "Internet addiction,"
video game violence, and
cyberbullying have received
much attention. The impact
of digital life on children's cognition is less
familiar to young users, their parents, and
teachers. Yet, new technologies have altered
key aspects of cognition. Writing, reading,
focusing, and remembering have all been
transformed, dictating new realities in the
classroom and beyond.
A large proportion of interpersonal communications among those old enough to
have a cellphone occurs over text messaging
platforms. As early as 2012, teens between
14 to 17 years old were sending a median
of 100 texts a day, according to the Pew Research Center. Much of these communications are in a language that bears little resemblance to the one they are being taught
in school. This comes at a cost: It is difficult
to convey meaning without the paralinguistic cues of gesture, facial expression,
emphasis, and intonation, and this problem
is hardly addressed by the creative addition
of emoticons or bitmojis to convey feelings.
Highly interpretable, the abbreviations,
symbols, and pictograms of e-language can-

not fulfill the role of language to express
with precision and nuance specific facts or
states of mind. Yet, digital-based communication is the new lingua franca.
This is compounded by the dumbing down
of content. The primacy of speed in electronic communication results in missives
that try to squeeze the most into unrealistically short sentences (if they can still be
called that). The physical limitations, even
for agile, well-trained fingers, to typing on a
small screen also conspire against extraneous detail or background, grammatical demands, or social niceties. The result can be
an avoidance or oversimplification of complexity and exchanges that are reduced to
decontextualized opinions, abrupt declamations, or rapid transactions.
Linguists may celebrate these changes as
signs of a language that is alive and evolving.
The same process that transformed "it is" to
"it's" may be transforming "laughing out loud"
to "LOL." Still, the speed with which written
expression is changing is unprecedented-
LOL itself seems passé among young texters,
having been replaced by pictures and various
iterations of the smiley face. The abandonment of even acronyms can be seen as a sign
of language regression, a sort of "evolution"
toward a neo-hieroglyphic age, with real cognitive implications.
Reading is similarly transformed. Some
eye-tracking experiments suggest that
people read a page differently online-in

a scanning "F" pattern superimposed on
the page, rather than top to bottom and
left to right. Research from University College London suggests that online readers
"scan, flick, and 'power-browse' their way
through digital content," constantly looking
for distractions in the form of other online
material they could be reading. These issues
would seem more acute for digital natives
who may have never had enough practice
with "traditional" reading. As happened
with writing, we have invented new ways
to read, perhaps cognitively rewiring our
brains along the way.
Attention, another pillar of cognition, is
also compromised. The rates of attentiondeficit and hyperactivity disorder, including in very young children, have risen, in a
manner that raises questions about the role
of early and very frequent screen exposure.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the estimated number
of children and adolescents who have ever
been diagnosed with ADHD increased from
4.4 million in 2003 to 6.1 million in 2016.
Other studies that directly assessed the
link between ADHD and excessive screen
time point to a strong association. This was
highlighted in a large meta-analysis of 15
studies that explored the association between ADHD and "internet addiction." It
concluded that internet addiction in adolescents and young adults was associated with
more severe symptoms of ADHD.

Of course, such data pose a chicken-or-egg
question: Do digital technology addicts develop ADHD because their attention spans
shorten online, or are kids with ADHD attracted to the internet because its pace
matches their compromised attention?
While the answer remains elusive, the correlation is there and may have contributed
to the increase seen in the number of stim-

Writing, reading, focusing,
and remembering have
all been transformed,
dictating new realities
in the classroom
and beyond."
ulant prescriptions: Drug usage statistics
suggest that the number of prescriptions
for the stimulant methyphenidate-such
as Ritalin and Concerta-has risen by
over 27 percent between 2004 and 2014
in the United States, and the number of
psychostimulants prescribed in the United
Kingdom has more than doubled over the

The Unintended Consequences of 'School Safety'
By Thalia González, Alexis Etow,
Cesar De La Vega,
& Camila Cribb-Fabersunne

What keeps schools safe is not
teachers carrying guns or young
people being placed in seclusion,
but instead learning environments
characterized by patience,
understanding, and empathy."

26 | EDUCATION WEEK | November 14, 2018 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary

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ver the past year, students and families across the country have held
vigils, hosted rallies, and walked out
of school to call attention to gun violence and school safety. Yet, federal
and local officials continue to promote ineffective, reactive solutions
to safety-such as increasing the
presence of school police and security, arming teachers
and staff, and removing critical civil rights protections
for students through the overreliance on exclusionary
school discipline practices.
As policymakers grapple with what it means for
schools to be safe, students have made one thing crystal
clear: The solution does not lie in increasing punitive
discipline practices or criminalization of their campuses.
In March, the Government Accountability Office released an analysis that detailed how Black children
continue to be pushed out of classrooms and deprived
of academic opportunities. Not only did it find that
Black students experience all forms of punishment in
schools at higher rates than their white peers, but that
these disparities are not isolated to one type of school
nor only present in middle and high school. Starting as
early as prekindergarten, Black students face harsher
treatment, placing them at risk for far-reaching negative consequences. Such consequences not only set
students up for academic failure and poorer education outcomes, but also place them at greater risk of
entering the school-to-prison pipeline and limit their
chances at overcoming other social determinants that

can threaten their future health and prosperity.
The use of exclusionary discipline practices can transform schools from spaces of healthy development and
growth to environments that compound stress, foster
mistrust, and further students' feelings of fear, isolation,
and helplessness.
Research suggests that what keeps schools safe is not
teachers carrying guns or young people being placed in
seclusion, but instead learning environments characterized by patience, understanding, and empathy.
If school safety becomes a pretext for expanded policing
and a return to zero-tolerance policies, our children will
simultaneously face a civil rights and public health crisis.
The same students who face harsher punishment and
loss of critical learning opportunities, are also disproportionately impacted by childhood adversity and toxic
stress, both of which are predictors for poor health outcomes in adulthood.
Childhood adversity and trauma hits children of color
the hardest, with 61 percent of Black children and 51 of
Hispanic children reporting at least one adverse childhood experience, compared with 40 percent of white children. These ACEs and other traumas impede students'
ability to focus, learn, and even regulate their emotions.
For students who experience trauma and childhood
adversity, their behaviors are often misunderstood or
mislabeled. This misunderstood behavior places them at
heightened risk for harsh punishments, including suspensions, expulsions, and use of force by school resource
officers.
Rather than continuing to punish our most marginalized students and deepening their health inequities,
political attention must turn to ensuring that schools
keep our children in the classroom and focus on what is
important for students: learning-and the school conditions that support it.

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Education Week - November 14, 2018

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