If someone takes something of yours from your locker, does it matter if they intended to steal, or if they grabbed it by mistake because they thought it was their locker? We see there is a moral difference here, because people’s intentions and beliefs matter. An inadvertent mistake is one thing, but intentionally stealing is another.
We can see the difference, but typically, children under six do not. They see both things as just as bad, because they do not consider intentions.
A recent study (Young et al., 2010) found the part of the brain that seems to be responsible for the consideration of intentions in moral judgment. This part of the brain, the right temporoparietal junction, develops between the ages of six and eleven.
I find this work fascinating because it implies that adolescents may still be developing the ability for deeper moral judgment when they get to middle school. It would help explain why they will sometimes make the argument that if the outcome did no harm then any transgression does not matter; taking something from someone’s locker is not that important if they get caught at it and have to return it.
Just like adolescents have to exercise our abstract thinking skills in order to fully develop and hone them, students probably need to practice and think about what morality means.
I think I’m going to have to figure out a framework for talking about morality for next cycle’s Personal World.
Note: Another interesting article on the role of the temporoparietal junction in meta-cognition.
Adolescents like to tick you off. Push all of your buttons to see what happens. And you want to ask, “Who are you really?” and, “Do your really not care?” We probably did the same when we were that age, but do you also remember how idealistic we were? The video below, from Penguin Publishing (found via The Dish) captures a bit of that duality of the adolescent mind. The use of white space and of just simply words also ties it quite nicely into our ongoing discussion of poetry in a “spark the imagination” kind of way.
This is an excellent program (and website) that really delves into a lot that is counter-intuitive about adolescents. It is strongly recommended for both teachers and students, because it goes into the fundamental question of why your teens seem like aliens. Indeed, it describes the type of research upon which the Montessori Middle School program is based.
We take half an hour each day, usually just after lunch, for personal reflection. Practicing metacognition. Some students have used the time for quick naps, and I’ve been thinking about how useful this is, or if the time might be used more effectively.
On one hand students wake up a little refreshed, and given the sleep deficit many adolescents have it’s not surprising that they need a little extra. In fact, I found one study (Gradisar et. al., 2008) that found that quite a number of adolescents catch up on sleep by napping during the week (many nap 4 times a week for around 16 hours). And studies with adults have found that naps help you learn. A recent USA Today article on the work of Matthew Walker reports:
sleep clears the brain’s short-term memory storage to make room for new learning. – USA Today (2010)
On the other hand, students need practice with introspection. I believe it’s one of the most important skills they can learn by practice.
Ultimately, I don’t have a problem with students napping during Personal World, as long as they don’t overdo it. And if they do overdo it, it may well be an indication that they need to work more on their sleep cycles at home.
I’m often surprised by how late my student get to sleep. It can range from 9 pm to past midnight, and I’d love to be able to recommend to parents that their kids should go to sleep earlier. However, the research on sleep patterns among adolescents shows the issue is a bit more complex.
First off, adolescents should get about 9 hours and 15 minutes of sleep per night according to Bill Dement (1999) who guided a lot of the foundational studies on sleep patterns. Not getting that much sleep, especially on recurring basis, results in sleep deprivation, which is well known to have a negative effect on school performance (Mayo Clinic staff, 2009). And a lot of adolescents are getting less than 9 hours.
But just setting earlier bedtimes may not work. Late in puberty adolescents’ biological clocks change, creating a window in the evening when it is difficult to get to sleep:
“[M]any adolescents … actually feel great at night and, for many of them, that makes it harder for them to even consider trying to go to bed earlier. So they’ll say goodnight to Mom and Dad and they’ll go into their rooms and read or play video games or talk on the phone. And they’re perfectly content and happy doing that, because they’re also at a phase where it’s easy for them to become aroused and stimulated by these activities. So it really does turn into a Catch–22. When people just say, “Well, all they have to do is go to bed earlier,” well, they really can’t go to sleep earlier necessarily.” – Mary Carskadon in Frontline (2002).
However, Mary Carskadon‘s research (and others) has shown that despite the changes in the biological clock that occur during adolescence, children still need the same total amount of sleep, even if they’re not getting it.
reduced habitual sleep time reported by adolescents may be related more to environmental factors (social, academic, and peer pressure) than to declining “need” for sleep. – Carskadon et. al. (1980)
So the fact that adolescents are not getting enough sleep is likely because of how society has changed. An interesting Brazilian study found that children living in homes without electrical lighting had significantly earlier sleep times than those with electricity (Peixoto et. al., 2009). Another study found that sleep deprivation was related to the amount of multitasking students did at night.
Adjust the lighting. As bedtime approaches, dim the lights. Turn the lights off during sleep. In the morning, expose your teen to bright light. These simple cues can help signal when it’s time to sleep and when it’s time to wake up.
Stick to a schedule. Tough as it may be, encourage your teen to go to bed and get up at the same time every day — even on weekends. Prioritize extracurricular activities and curb late-night social time as needed. If your teen has a job, limit working hours to no more than 16 to 20 hours a week.
Nix long naps. If your teen is drowsy during the day, a 30-minute nap after school may be refreshing. But too much daytime shut-eye may only make it harder to fall asleep at night.
Curb the caffeine. A jolt of caffeine may help your teen stay awake during class, but the effects are fleeting. And too much caffeine can interfere with a good night’s sleep.
Keep it calm. Encourage your teen to wind down at night with a warm shower, a book or other relaxing activities — and avoid vigorous exercise, loud music, video games, text messaging, Web surfing and other stimulating activities shortly before bedtime. Take the TV out of your teen’s room, or keep it off at night. The same goes for your teen’s cell phone and computer.
Finally, I’m still thinking about what this means for students taking naps during personal world time. I’m not usually opposed to the occasional short nap, but just how much does this help?
The title of Mark Bauerlein‘s book is somewhat provocative. It’s called, “The Dumbest Generation, How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.” As I am very much an advocate for incorporating technology in the classroom, it’s not too unexpected that I disagree with large parts of his thesis.
Yes there is probably an important link between the brain and the hand that facilitates creative work. But it does not necessarily follow that, “Writing by hand, students will give more thought to the craft of composition. They will pause over a verb, review a transition, check sentence lengths …” (Bauerlein, 2010). As we work on habits of revision there seems to be no real reason why they should spend more time on improving a sentence they’ve hand written than one they’ve typed. True, if students are conditioned to write in short rapid bursts of texting it will translate into their other writing, but it is the role of the teacher to help them delineate these different genres of writing. I also have not seen the evidence that writing by hand is any less abstract than writing by typing on a keyboard. We are already expressing ideas using an abstract medium, words, why is one form of expression better than the other?
Where I do agree with Bauerlein is on the need to take breaks, even substantial ones, from technology and the online world. Where I see the greatest need for this is in aiding student’s comprehension of the natural world. You live too long in the virtual world and you begin to translate that experience into the real world. Yet the virtual world remains a model of the real one. It is simplified and enhanced to make it a more enjoyable experience, so the lessons you learn there do not truly apply to the real world. In addition, physical experience in the virtual world, at least for now, cannot create the kinesthetic, mind-body understanding of the laws of physics and biology that you learn from real-world games and just walking along the nature trail. This is why I am a firm believer in our week-long immersions every six weeks.
So I continue to allow my students to introduce new technology to the classroom, as long as they can show me that it is effective in helping them learn. The latest thing is the proliferation of iPod Touches. I like the iPods because of apps like iSeismo that lets you monitor vibrations in 3D. However, on our recent visit to the Le Bonheur Hospital a number of my students took their notes on their iPods. I personally don’t believe that these are more effective than pencil and paper because you can’t combine text and images very effectively on an iPod, but they did take copious notes (which they were quite proud to show me). I’m planning on giving them a quick quiz to see what they learned from the trip so we’ll see just how effective their note taking was.
We’re all swimming in a sea of new technologies, and we can’t really tell what will benefit and what will hinder without trying them out. So, I at least conclude that the key goal of middle school education should be to create in students a core competence and confidence that will help students navigate steadily in this world of much information and rapidly changing fads. A fundamental understanding of the mechanisms that underlie people’s behavior is key. Know yourself and understand how societies behave. The first is not trivial and the second requires drawing general conclusions from a lot of historical data, which is quite challenging for most adolescents, but that’s why we teach the way we do.
Note: There is an interesting discussion of the use of technology in the traditional classroom going on now on Will Richardson blog post “The Big Questions: Now What?“
Different parts of the brain mature at different rates. By early adolescence the parts of the brain responsible for social interaction are pretty well developed, but the parts responsible for critical thinking and impulse control (the frontal cortex) are not.
We visited the Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital today. And after a tour, a couple of people from the neurological division gave us a nice little presentation about the human brain. They used Rita Carter’s DVD, “The Human Brain“, which has a great animation of electrical signals pulsing from neuron to neuron through the neural network. I’m considering getting it for the class because the animations and the interactive slicing of the human brain are pretty neat. You can, however, find some, free applications for looking at the whole human body from the Visible Human Project.
Anyway, the fact that impulse control and critical thinking abilities are late to develop did not require fancy brain imaging to discover. Jean Paiget’s research on cognitive developmental stages found evidence that abstract thinking did not develop until the early teens. In fact, he found that abstract thinking (or formal operations as he called it) did not necessarily develop at all. As the frontal cortex matures, the ability to do abstract thinking also develops, but that does not necessarily mean that everyone learns how to do it. (At this point I make an unbiased pitch for the Montessori approach opposed to traditional schooling).
It’s very nice, or perhaps a better word is “elegant”, when very different types of research, using fundamentally different methods come to the same conclusions. In this case, neuroscience (brain imaging), which is ultimately based on physics and biology corroborates the psychological research into cognitive development, which is primarily based on observation and survey.
In terms of general use, girls utilized computers to connect with others, and boys used computers to compete with others. – Christie (2005)
There are clear gender differences in the way adolescents use computers and play computer/console games. Boys tend toward the violent, competitive games. This is not just my own experience as the above quote from a large study of middle schoolers in South Carolina shows.
Furthermore, and more worrisome, the violence in the games may spill over into real life. In 2004, Gentile et al. found that:
Adolescents who expose themselves to greater amounts of video game violence were more hostile, reported getting into arguments with teachers more frequently, were more likely to be involved in physical fights, and performed more poorly in school. –
They reference a 2001 study by Anderson and Bushman that integrated a lot of the previous work and showed that:
… across 54 independent tests of the relation between video game violence and aggression, involving 4262 participants, there appear to be five consistent results of playing games with violent content. Playing violent games increases aggressive behaviors, increases aggressive cognitions, increases aggressive emotions, increases physiological arousal, and decreases prosocial behaviors. These effects are robust; they have been found in children and adults, in males and females, and in experimental and non- experimental studies
In graphical form it looks like this: How video games lead to aggression. (From Anderson and Bushman, 2001)
I can’t say I’ve observed this myself, but it is certainly cause for concern. In fact, a later study by the same authors and Nicholas Carnagey (Carnagey et al., 2007) found that people who played violent video games were actually physically desensitized to violence (though the method used in this study is not nearly as convincing as the previous work).
Finally, the degree you can personalize characters in video games is improving rapidly. Some very recent research from Fischer et al. (2010) found that:
playing a violent video game with a personalized game character … increased aggressive responses.
I have to say that I find the evidence from this albeit quick survey of the science to be both disturbing and damning. Of course these scientific studies are statistical averages, and each individual is different and is affected by a larger environment than is just in the violent video games. Indeed, I have played these games myself, I know intensive gamers, and have students who regularly play these games and can’t say that I’ve observed much correlation with the games and aggressive behavior. But then again it is sometimes hard to see the forest from beneath the trees.
I guess I’m going to have to be more strict about violent video games. We don’t allow them in the classroom (in general), but I think I’m going to have to stress the issue a bit more when I talk to students and their parents. Of particular concern is when violent games overlap with video game addiction. As with everything in life, moderation is important, and in a time when students are going through large changes and discovering themselves it is essential to help them with self-regulation.
