I wouldn’t relate this directly to cognitive performance.
But my anecdotal experience working with younger employees / interns has been an uptick in situations where they become “paralyzed” by a fear of making a mistake, coupled with the inability to ask questions / seek out help.
They’ll google, or use ai, but if that doesn’t deliver an answer instead of asking a co worker, they will sit on an issue until someone follows up with them.
There also seems to be a huge fear of submitting “something” that’s not good enough where the preference seems to be “nothing” if they’re worried it’s not good enough.
I notice this in organizations I’ve been in leadership roles, but also have had this expressed to me by a half dozen peers in other organizations.
This seems like a testimony from a pop-science professor. Credentials seem to mostly point to self-help books and paid speaking events. The first graph in the written testimony show a direct decline in scores with screen time. However the linked data does not show this.
Using the US alone scores from 2000 to 2022 have not really moved.[1] They have fluctuated but in those 22 years the score is largely unchanged except in Mathematics where the US has declined. Dr. Horvath links to the 2015 PISA results, but screen time is not a part of that data. I got through the paper to this point and if they already faltering this badly then it's not worth my time to keep reading. Plenty of idiots and misinformed people testify before Congress. That doesn't make their statements empirically true and arguments right.
The sad part is the amount of people who will take it as gospel as it already conforms to their biases of children and technology.
The article makes some interesting points about the correlation between computer usage in schools and test scores. What I would be interested in is the unmetered computer usage outside of schools. Are students with restricted access to so-called "brain-rot" social media outperforming those with it?
As a parent of a middle schooler and an elementary schooler, I don't need a formal study to answer that question. I've met my childrens' classmates. Sometimes, anecdotal evidence is sufficient.
And, I wish they were using real computers! Unfortunately, they're on tablets.
There's something quietly poetic about a thread on declining cognitive performance where one of the top comment is "here's a video if you don't want to read."
This is world wide, look around us, everything is broken.
Early 2000s is when humanity peaked, the technology is making some people dumber.
Kids cannot speak and yet have access to tablet.
Students cannot study without AI anymore.
Teachers saying not even giving them the answer helps, they don't know what to do.
If you never watched the movie 2006 Idiocracy, do it!!
It was supposed to be a comedy movie but sadly, it describes the world we are living right now.
Feels like there's a number of these trend shifts that are hard to explain, that make a fantastic canvas for projecting world views onto. The school performance dip is one, global decline in birth rates another.
You see it explained as the result of everything. Be it microplastics, mobile phones, immigrants, long covid, climate change (, stress about), social media, AI, glyphosate, 5G, the elders of zion, the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, something to do with late stage capitalism... everyone seems to have their personal landscape of theories as to why this is happening.
You can probably ask someone to enumerate what they think causes this dip, and use it as a pretty reliable embedding for their entire political worldview.
I completely reject these policy statements based on the data laid out.
Standardized education is failing and doesn't fit the modern world. We need radically individualized education. By 2050 no student in the school system should speak the same language. There is no "correct" way to learn. We need, now more than ever, diversity of thought.
I agree with you in principle to an extent, but many would argue that standardized cookie-cutter education produced what gains we had and education policies which tried to accommodate diversity of thought are responsible for the declines due to lack of rigor and any real standards. "Reading by vibes" [1] directly led to declines in literacy, and there are attempts in math to accommodate different styles of thinking which may be undermining rigor there as well.
I suspect teachers are caught in a catch-22 of only being able to teach what's on the curriculum and nothing else, so they have no room for flexibility to engage students, while also being under pressure to produce high grades; but when the curriculum is garbage and the students aren't interested...grading standards tend to be what's compromised. The schools and parents are happy their kid has A's, teachers get to keep their jobs, and students may graduate highschool without having ever read a book cover to cover. [2]
The Mississippi Miracle seems to have happened by a reversion to proven standards and actually holding kids to them before letting them pass to the next grade.
And before you raise the standard objection, racial minorities showed even greater improvement than whute kids.
If old teaching styles / standardized testing / standardized schooling represent this moribund, stagnant thing that haven't changed at all and haven't kept pace over the past century, why wouldn't you expect measured learning performance to hold steady as well instead of declining? The students basically have the same brains that they've always had. There isn't as much lead in the water as there used to be, in the atmosphere as there used to be, and parents take prenatal vitamins. They're starting from the same raw stuff that they've always been starting from, if not better. So why would they be getting worse? Children one generation ago didn't need individualized curricula and testing to achieve the performance that they got. Why does the current generation need that, and by what mechanism would that improve their performance?
I don't know if you've seen curriculums recently but they are totally about individualized education. Between IEPs and 504s, accommodations are made for nearly anything now. Students are put all into one large class, no more AP, Advanced, Standard because this caused hurt feelings for kids that could not make the advanced class. Students are pooled and the rationale is the more advanced students will help the less advanced students (!).
What this means in the classroom is teachers can not go as fast, advanced students get bored, every person has their own INDIVIDUALIZED test (3 instead of 4 questions, no write in questions, landscape instead of portrait, etc). This drives teachers absolutely insane and they cannot teach at any efficient level. Grading is so bad, teachers structure their course to have less exams because grading ten different quizzes and exams cannot be optimized.
A lot of this is parents disbelief that their little Johnny is not the next einstein so they torment teachers via policy hacks to give their children advantages. Admin doesn't care because they'll just fire "low performers" lol.
There is the above problem, and then there are the revisionist math ideas that common core and friends produce better outcomes instead of "rote" math. Well, math has been taught via rote for decades, possibly centuries, and people under that scheme learned math in a way that they became draughtsman and scientists, so maybe there is some proof in the pudding. My friends who did common core are barely math literate, can't calculate a tip even if you give them the hack: move decimal left by one place and times by two.
Before you come at me for being ableist, remember that this means even with these accommodations people are doing worse.
Also, no phonics?! Wtf?
People <25 in normal jobs (retail) cannot do simple fractions of 1/2 and 1/4.
Something is wrong. I'm not saying these guys are right but don't blame standardized education which was systematized in the 70s-90s just yet. I would posit that hostile admins/policy, dumb revisionist ideas that have no basis in history, and NO NATIONAL CURRICULUM. Why we do not have a national curriculum seems crazy to me, but there must be some reason. Surely we can agree on that at least.
I agree with you that right now is the best time for individual augmentation for education, and we should wield that power for good. But I do think it can be in service of a system.
EDIT: just realized this is a blog post length, sorry. It is one of my pet issues, n=3, mom works with people at deli that cannot do fractions (they get fired, up to 20 so far), teacher friend 15y in history has to make custom exams, and publisher friend who sees young writers (<25, n=??) can't sound out words.
Don’t need educated citizens for a dictatorship of the elites where you only need to press buttons with a picture of a burger on them because your economy was outsourced to poorer countries
The data cited are international organizations so they are generally pretty trustworthy. However looking at the data tells a very different story from what this professor is claiming. They are averaging all countries regardless of context. Including countries at war, countries who have inconsistent data, etc. Not to mention all the different educational systems. Looking at each country though the results are fairly consistent from 2000 to 2022.
yial|21 days ago
But my anecdotal experience working with younger employees / interns has been an uptick in situations where they become “paralyzed” by a fear of making a mistake, coupled with the inability to ask questions / seek out help.
They’ll google, or use ai, but if that doesn’t deliver an answer instead of asking a co worker, they will sit on an issue until someone follows up with them.
There also seems to be a huge fear of submitting “something” that’s not good enough where the preference seems to be “nothing” if they’re worried it’s not good enough.
I notice this in organizations I’ve been in leadership roles, but also have had this expressed to me by a half dozen peers in other organizations.
takklob|21 days ago
[deleted]
jajuuka|21 days ago
Using the US alone scores from 2000 to 2022 have not really moved.[1] They have fluctuated but in those 22 years the score is largely unchanged except in Mathematics where the US has declined. Dr. Horvath links to the 2015 PISA results, but screen time is not a part of that data. I got through the paper to this point and if they already faltering this badly then it's not worth my time to keep reading. Plenty of idiots and misinformed people testify before Congress. That doesn't make their statements empirically true and arguments right.
The sad part is the amount of people who will take it as gospel as it already conforms to their biases of children and technology.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...
jmercouris|21 days ago
overtone1000|21 days ago
And, I wish they were using real computers! Unfortunately, they're on tablets.
Swizec|21 days ago
TheJCDenton|21 days ago
h4kunamata|21 days ago
Kids cannot speak and yet have access to tablet. Students cannot study without AI anymore. Teachers saying not even giving them the answer helps, they don't know what to do.
If you never watched the movie 2006 Idiocracy, do it!! It was supposed to be a comedy movie but sadly, it describes the world we are living right now.
marginalia_nu|21 days ago
You see it explained as the result of everything. Be it microplastics, mobile phones, immigrants, long covid, climate change (, stress about), social media, AI, glyphosate, 5G, the elders of zion, the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, something to do with late stage capitalism... everyone seems to have their personal landscape of theories as to why this is happening.
You can probably ask someone to enumerate what they think causes this dip, and use it as a pretty reliable embedding for their entire political worldview.
casey2|21 days ago
Standardized education is failing and doesn't fit the modern world. We need radically individualized education. By 2050 no student in the school system should speak the same language. There is no "correct" way to learn. We need, now more than ever, diversity of thought.
helterskelter|21 days ago
I suspect teachers are caught in a catch-22 of only being able to teach what's on the curriculum and nothing else, so they have no room for flexibility to engage students, while also being under pressure to produce high grades; but when the curriculum is garbage and the students aren't interested...grading standards tend to be what's compromised. The schools and parents are happy their kid has A's, teachers get to keep their jobs, and students may graduate highschool without having ever read a book cover to cover. [2]
1: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/the-rise-...
2: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...
alex43578|21 days ago
The reality is there’s no single way to learn, but there’s plenty of good-enough ways.
bitwize|21 days ago
And before you raise the standard objection, racial minorities showed even greater improvement than whute kids.
Edman274|21 days ago
AuthAuth|21 days ago
lm28469|21 days ago
That's a hard cap a ~7000 students world wide unless we start inventing new languages.
I can't tell if this comment is sarcasm
anarticle|21 days ago
I don't know if you've seen curriculums recently but they are totally about individualized education. Between IEPs and 504s, accommodations are made for nearly anything now. Students are put all into one large class, no more AP, Advanced, Standard because this caused hurt feelings for kids that could not make the advanced class. Students are pooled and the rationale is the more advanced students will help the less advanced students (!).
What this means in the classroom is teachers can not go as fast, advanced students get bored, every person has their own INDIVIDUALIZED test (3 instead of 4 questions, no write in questions, landscape instead of portrait, etc). This drives teachers absolutely insane and they cannot teach at any efficient level. Grading is so bad, teachers structure their course to have less exams because grading ten different quizzes and exams cannot be optimized.
A lot of this is parents disbelief that their little Johnny is not the next einstein so they torment teachers via policy hacks to give their children advantages. Admin doesn't care because they'll just fire "low performers" lol.
There is the above problem, and then there are the revisionist math ideas that common core and friends produce better outcomes instead of "rote" math. Well, math has been taught via rote for decades, possibly centuries, and people under that scheme learned math in a way that they became draughtsman and scientists, so maybe there is some proof in the pudding. My friends who did common core are barely math literate, can't calculate a tip even if you give them the hack: move decimal left by one place and times by two.
Before you come at me for being ableist, remember that this means even with these accommodations people are doing worse.
Also, no phonics?! Wtf?
People <25 in normal jobs (retail) cannot do simple fractions of 1/2 and 1/4.
Something is wrong. I'm not saying these guys are right but don't blame standardized education which was systematized in the 70s-90s just yet. I would posit that hostile admins/policy, dumb revisionist ideas that have no basis in history, and NO NATIONAL CURRICULUM. Why we do not have a national curriculum seems crazy to me, but there must be some reason. Surely we can agree on that at least.
I agree with you that right now is the best time for individual augmentation for education, and we should wield that power for good. But I do think it can be in service of a system.
EDIT: just realized this is a blog post length, sorry. It is one of my pet issues, n=3, mom works with people at deli that cannot do fractions (they get fired, up to 20 so far), teacher friend 15y in history has to make custom exams, and publisher friend who sees young writers (<25, n=??) can't sound out words.
Cold_Miserable|21 days ago
bodhi_mind|21 days ago
gurumeditations|21 days ago
toomuchtodo|21 days ago
epsilonsalts|21 days ago
Trump is obviously untrustworthy because he keeps saying the quiet part out loud.
The rest of the government obfuscates untrustworthiness and elders love to drag youth as the source of moral decay in our society.
We are generally more educated these days though so "look at them eating avocado toast!" and straight up fear mongering won't cut it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seduction_of_the_Innocent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Music_Resource_Center
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26328105.amp
So they resort to unfalsifiable data. You all going to put the work in that would be required to refute this?
But if they insist on playing this game, OK:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_deni...
jajuuka|21 days ago
837263292029|20 days ago
bibimsz|21 days ago
[deleted]
riotnrrd|20 days ago
hackable_sand|21 days ago
sieep|21 days ago