New Tech Network

In many schools, project-based learning happens in isolated cases: in certain teachers’ classrooms here and there, or in the contexts of specific subjects. But for students to benefit from project-based learning, ideally it’s part of a school’s infrastructure — a way to approach learning holistically.

For one quickly growing network of schools, project-based learning is the crux of the entire ecosystem. New Tech Network, which was founded 15 years ago, is taking its school-wide project-based model to national scale. The organization, which offers a paid program for schools to use its model, began with a flagship school in Napa and has grown to 120 schools in 18 states, most of which are public schools.

The network has not only grown in size, but also in notoriety. President Obama visited Manor New Tech High School in Texas last week, as part of an effort to promote an education agenda focused on producing graduates that can compete in today’s global economy.

The nod from the president comes at a time when New Tech is attempting to position itself as a successful model to follow. But rather than relying on test scores and such quantifiable numbers to prove its value, New Tech’s own 2013 annual report frames success by focusing on deeper learning that can’t be measured by standardized test scores and their college readiness. Yet it’s that lack of emphasis on test scores, an all-consuming worry for many districts, that makes it more difficult for the organization to pin point numbers to tell its story.

Here are a few of the statistics New Tech has gathered from their schools: students graduate at a rate six percent higher than the national average and enroll in college nine percent more than the average. They also persist in four-year universities at a 17 percent higher rate and 46 percent higher rate when it comes to two year colleges. Perhaps most importantly, they claim that students’ higher order thinking skills between freshmen and senior years grow 75 percent more than a comparison group that did not attend a New Tech high school.

New Tech calls itself a school development organization and is a non-profit subsidiary of KnowledgeWorks, another non-profit that acts as a foundation, education policy advocate and on-the-ground work through mergers with groups like New Tech, Strive and EdWorks.

GRAPPLING WITH THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM

New Tech offers whole-school change to any school interested in contracting with them, including public schools. It has implemented the model in charter and private schools as well, but the majority of its clients are public schools. “From where we stand, public school districts are as capable of innovative schools as charter schools,” said Lydia Dobyns, president of New Tech Network. But as everyone in education knows, every school and every district has different needs, and the organization’s offerings are changed accordingly.

New Tech schools are entirely project-based and cross-disciplinary. Students take courses like Bio-literacy, which mesh subjects together, emphasizing that disciplines are not stand-alone endeavors. Technology is woven throughout the school day and at home seamlessly. Many New Tech schools have one-to-one programs and all schools in the network use a learning management system called Echo that tracks student progress, is open to teachers and students, and connects New Tech educators around the country.

New Tech Network

Assessments are designed to measure different kinds of learning outcomes. Mike Reed, principal of Columbus Signature Academy in Indiana, said that only 60 percent of assessment is based on content. The other 40 percent is based on what he called “school-wide learning outcomes,” things like written and oral proficiency, work ethic, presentation skills and the ability to give and take feedback. Students can see the project rubric and know where they need to improve their skills.

“Looking at school performance is really different from looking at student growth, which is really what we want to focus on,” Dobyns said. That’s why New Tech doesn’t promise to increase school test scores – it sees that as a separate question, and one that they’re not necessarily interested in.

The schools that have taken on this model don’t seem to mind that test scores aren’t the focus. “A big difference you’d see is student engagement,” Reed said. “Students are working on authentic projects and problems.” He gave an example of a cross curricular physics and environmental science class that studied the physics of power and electricity. “Our students learned those skills and then rewired houses that were destroyed in New Orleans’ 9th Ward. They’re going to remember that far longer than regurgitating a test or a lab.”

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

New Tech works with schools individually, offering professional development as the school gets started. “One of the things we’ve learned and changed is that every implementation is now a custom designed implementation plan,” Dobyns said.

New Tech sticks with a school for five years, spending the first year laying ground work, listening to what schools want and need and garnering teacher buy-in. They offer intensive trainings to help teachers retool skills to teach entirely-project based and cross-curricular classes. Each school is given a coach who visits throughout the school year, checks on lesson plans, suggests changes and helps troubleshoot problems. And New Tech focuses on nurturing the leadership capacity of principals so they can continue to innovate with teachers.

[RELATED READING: Are Teachers of Tomorrow Prepared to Use Innovative Tech?]

At Columbus Signature Academy, Reed and his staff discussed the professional culture they wanted to promote and decided they’d make decisions by consensus. “That changes everything in a school,” Reed said. Those affected by a decision get equal say in making it, and that includes students. For example, teachers are in charge of the master schedule because it affects them most, but students can weigh in about how changes affect them too.

If gaining consensus is important in New Tech Schools, so is transparency. Teachers share and vet lessons with colleagues at the beginning and end of every project to learn from successes and mistakes. Teachers aren’t penalized if something they try doesn’t work out. They share their successes, experiments, and failures and everyone learns from the experience. That’s the kind of collaborative learning schools expect from students and Dobyns thinks it’s important that teachers experience and practice it too.

TRANSITION CHALLENGES

Opening or converting to a New Tech school can mean some growing pains.

“It’s almost a month of de-programming,” said Randy Hollenkamp, director of Bulldog Tech in San Jose, one of the few middle schools New Tech has begun to pilot. When kids enter his seventh grade they are so used to the traditional school system, they don’t know how to work collaboratively on projects. “At first their grades go down just because it’s projects. It’s actually kind of harder because you have to be a self-learner.” In traditional schools, kids are constantly being directed, so they don’t have to think for themselves as much, Hollenkamp said.

“Every year, as you grow into it, it’s difficult for the group of students who aren’t a part of New Tech,” said Jason Witzigreuter, principal of Adams Central in Monroe, Indiana. Adams Central is a unique school in the New Tech Network because it is a K-12 school under one roof, but only the high school uses New Tech’s model. Witzigreuter calls his school a hybrid model and a learning experience. The school is three years into the experiment, which means the seniors are the only class without their own laptops and without some of the communication and presentation skills that the freshmen quickly pick up.

“Our kids at a lower grade are able to understand how to collaborate better and use those soft skills, or 21st century skills, better because they’ve been taught that through New Tech,” Witzigreuter said. He tries to use the younger students’ success to encourage seniors into demonstrating the same kinds of higher order thinking and maturity.

[RELATED READING: How Can Teachers Prepare Kids for a Connected World?]

From New Tech’s perspective, one of the hardest things about working on a five-year timeline can be school leadership changes. And, like any part of the public school system, funding cuts can affect whether a district is able to continue to pay for the program.

COSTS

New Tech’s model is not cheap. It costs about $100,000-$120,000 per year for each school. That hefty fee includes support, training, professional development, and access to the knowledge and experience of all the other schools in the network. Still, to pay for it, districts have done everything from pass school bonds, apply for state innovation grants, apply for private foundation grants and beg districts for the money. In addition to New Tech’s service fees, schools have to pay for the technology that accompanies the program and often facility redesign to foster more collaborative “studio” spaces.

Though it’s a big price tag, the principals interviewed at three New Tech schools thought the money was well spent. Success For All is another school development program that uses a “whole school” model at the elementary school level. They estimate that for 500 students, their program costs $120,000 in the first year and decreases to $50,000 in the second year, finally reaching $30,000 in the third year. High schools programs generally cost more than elementary programs, though.

NEW DIRECTIONS

New Tech has proven that its model is scalable, in part with extra cash from its parent company KnowledgeWorks. Now they’re trying to see if it can work beyond high school. In the past year New Tech has opened 10 middle schools in various states and is dipping into the elementary school scene as well. They’re also trying to find ways for districts to expand the model to other schools nearby on their own. “The first New Tech School can be an anchor in their district and then the strategies can spread across the schools,” Dobyns said. Leaders and teachers at the anchor school could act as trainers and coaches to others, lowering the cost of transitioning future schools.

Flickr: Naomi Chung

While it may be easy to imagine how iPads can support classroom studies with reading, history, or science, some of the most groundbreaking — and creative — work with digital tools may be happening in arts classes. Schools using iPads are incorporating them in art and music classes, too — and not only as tools for measuring and remembering, but for creating as well. Whether or not students grow up to become the next David Hockney – who has created several New Yorker covers using the iPad’s drawing tool – teachers say there is value to learning to create using digital tools, especially when blended with more hands-on means of expression.

Susan Sonnemaker, a middle school chorus and band teacher at San Francisco Day School, uses school-provided tablets in limited amounts throughout the year. She finds them most useful for managing technical aspects of music class with record speed — like recording practice sessions, using a tuner app to help kids tune their own instruments, and collecting digital practice sheets. For practical matters, Sonnemaker says, the iPad has been invaluable, because streamlining and managing tuning and practice leaves more time for actually playing or singing music.

But what about using tablets for inspiration and creating new music? When it comes to creating something new, Sonnemaker says that technology helps her students be more creative, not less: “In regards to composition, students are not only more engaged in their own projects (with iPads), but they’re using real life technology,” she said. “We still do a good deal of composition exercises using old-fashioned pencil and paper. But using Garageband on the iPad is what many professional musicians use, so students are also acquiring skills to compose in the real world if they choose to continue.”

Benefield’s colleague, visual art teacher Karen Richards, notes that iPad apps have made the tools that digital artists use much more accessible for young children, but having the digital technology available doesn’t at all diminish hands-on art making. “I must stress that technology is one of many tools our students have to execute their critical and creative thinking. We believe that they must also know how to sew, woodwork, sculpt in clay, paint, draw, make prints, shoot a good photo, animate an image, and know about the artists that they stand on the shoulders of,” Richards said.

Richards describes a recent photography-based project she developed in order for children to blend the two: “They’re all taking tons of photos (with the iPads), so we worked on photography. We also learned a bit about Photoshop with Photoshop Express, and we had each student (K-8) edit and alter their photo before printing it out on watercolor paper,” she said. The final outcome was a sewing project inspired by textile artist and San Francisco Day School artist-in-residence Ehren Reed, where the students sewed into their photos.

In January of this year, the Indianapolis Museum of Art opened the Star Studio, an interactive exhibit that includes a room filled with iPads featuring a museum-customized drawing app. Tools include digital blending sticks, markers, chalk and paint brushes. Originally intended for children ages five to eight to explore the fundamentals of art alongside their parents, says Jen Mayhill, Senior Coordinator of Play and Learning at the museum, in reality the exhibit’s popularity has extended much further. “We’re seeing people of all ages and abilities using the application now.” Mayhill mentioned that, even though she doesn’t have the numbers yet, the exhibit is popular; a feature that allows visitors to email their finished iPad artwork has already yielded over 1,500 emails of art. “Purely from my own observations, I cannot imagine this space without these components, since they appear to be as popular as the tables including more traditional art mediums.”

Media and communications scholar/philosopher Marshall McLuhen wrote in 1964: “We shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us.” McLuhen’s eerily prescient observation of today’s interactive world hints at the idea that some essential aspects of what we think of as traditional art fall away as we increasingly move to more digital forms. Louisville-based artist Douglas Miller confesses to “secretly abhorring” computer-generated art, and some of his ink-and-paint hand-drawn works are actually a response to the speed of creating work via technology. “I have made images that are ‘reverse engineered’ as a commentary on the ease of computer art — I will painstakingly re-draw a mirror image of a subject when it could be done easily with a simple click in Photoshop.” Miller, 39, has noticed the generation gap when he lectures to college students who have always had computers at home and in classrooms. “I see the overuse and reliance on it in classrooms as possibly detrimental to artmaking.”

While work like Miller’s is decidedly un-tech, his painstaking efforts to stay analog highlight the tension between handmade and digital art – about what it means to be creative, and what constitutes art. In this way, can digital art become a catalyst for students, an opportunity for them to ask, what is the best means of creating my message?

Plano, Texas, high school art teacher Christine Miller, who was chosen to pilot this year’s Arts and Digital Literacy Initiative funded by the Texas Cultural Trust, explains that, while she gives students free reign to create art by both digital and hands-on means, her students are actually more reluctant to use technology than one might assume. “Not all young students are interested in utilizing technology to make their art,” she said. “There can be much resistance in my classroom when we work on an art project that is going to be produced using Photoshop. I explain to my students that these are just alternative tools, and like any other tool, you can create something digitally that would be impossible to create by hand. Conversely, you can create something by hand that you cannot replicate digitally.”

Miller teaches Art and Media Communications for the pilot program, and while her school doesn’t provide an iPad for each student, the course is designed to bring fine arts and digital literacy together. She describes the curriculum as aiming to be relevant to students’ lives through the use of technology, while also helping to foster collaboration and divergent thinking. In order to get students to focus on divergent thinking, she shows them Sir Ken Robinson’s famous Changing Education Paradigms video on the first day of school.

“It [divergent thinking] is extremely difficult for the majority of my students. Truly, only a small percentage of my students think on a level I would call divergent,” Miller said. “In the regard that technology is affecting their perceptions of the world and they regurgitate those perceptions out automatically, then yes, technology is impacting their thinking and artistic creativity in a huge way.”

The biggest influence of technology on students, Miller said, is the amount of “visual culture” in their artwork. “Because of the prevalence of popular cultural imagery everywhere, those characters (Sponge Bob, Anonymous, Pokemon) are the first images that show up in many of their art pieces. Their brains have been so saturated with this imagery, they are often unable to come up with a unique image or character of their own,” she said.

Finding – or creating – the original idea in a massive sea of ever-present information, images and text might prove difficult when it comes to art created using online and social networks on devices that can fit in a backpack or pocket — there is, simply, so much input. But Susan Sonnemaker said she doesn’t really see that happening in her music class.

“I think that in a world where kids are inundated with technology, I could see the point about less thought and creativity, but I don’t think it’s what happens,” she said. “The kids I see using iPads are able to engage in creativity in ways they couldn’t before, and in an instant, rather than waiting to get their thoughts down on paper. My students can write their original music in GarageBand in an instant, or record themselves creating music/poetry in an instant. I think it’s a tool for kids to use when they find inspiration.”

Christine Miller is reminded that, throughout history, early adopters to a new tool or technology (think photography) weren’t always readily accepted: “There are always those who protest art produced by ‘that technology’ as not being ‘authentic’ or ‘valuable’ or ‘respected’ works of art.”

All the teachers interviewed agreed that art made with the body using sensory, physical materials, is beyond valuable to understanding the artistic process, and should never be replaced (one Broadway dancer who teaches children’s dance emphasized, “Hands-on first, technology later.”). But all the same teachers also saw value in using the digital to enhance and even alter the act of creation. Where will iPad art take us? And what will we leave behind? Only the young artists will know for sure.

Elisabeth Hahn and Geoff Marietta

Disruptive students can be a big challenge for teachers in charge of a room full of 30 students. There isn’t always time to get to the bottom of student behavior and in a large class those students can derail learning for everyone. But what if there was a way to help kids stop acting out and show more empathy for classmates and teachers?

A group of Harvard education researchers have developed a virtual simulation for “walking in another person’s shoes” to help students relate to one another better. It’s part of a project called Social Aspects of Immersive Learning (SAIL) funded by the National Science Foundation. “The ability to accurately read people is really important to make compromises,” said Elisabeth Hahn, a doctoral candidate at the Harvard School of Education in a recent edWeb webinar.

The technical term is “social perspective taking” and it means understanding another person by taking in their thoughts, feelings and motivations. Accurately reading another person requires both motivation and ability, qualities that Hahn and other researchers are discovering can be taught.

The benefits of reading others are well documented, Hahn said. Taking in social perspective helps people become less ego-centric, decreases use of stereotypes, increases perspectives of similarity, and diminishes social aggression. These effects could make a big impact on many classrooms where the success of the lesson can hinge on how well a teacher is able to interact with the students. “It becomes much easier to empathize and leads to benefits in relationships and ultimately educational outcomes for kids,” Hahn said.

In an effort to create an experience that will help build these types of positive relationships through nuanced social perspective, Hahn’s team used a video game simulation to give participants the experience of “walking in another’s shoes.”

[RELATED READING: Empathy: the Key to Social and Emotional Learning]

The scenario involves a confrontation between a park ranger and a golf course owner who share land, but disagree over how to use it. The simulation allows a participant to play the role of the golf course owner, walking around in his world, talking to his colleagues and getting a sense for his perspective and opinions about the world. The player then has the same experience walking in the shoes of the park ranger. Finally, the player is asked to negotiate from the perspective of the golf course owner with the park ranger over various differences of opinion related to how the land should be treated. Each of the points of negotiation had a money value attached, giving the player a stake in the outcome of the negotiations.

“There was a pretty large positive effect from walking in the shoes of the ranger and we seemed to get down to what caused this to happen,” said Geoff Marietta, another doctoral candidate on the research team. Participants were more likely to compromise in the negotiations resulting in positive relationship building between the golf course owner and the park ranger. “What caused the effect on the relationship was really enhanced social perspective taking and people perceiving greater behavioral similarity,” Marietta said.

The researchers also experimented with giving participants written information about the park ranger’s perspective, but that didn’t improve willingness to compromise or negotiate. When they gave participants a detailed transcript, however, they were able to achieve negotiation results and positive relationship building similar to those of participants who walked in the virtual shoes of the park ranger.

“This has great potential to use virtual environments to improve interpersonal relationships that are not possible in the real world, to actually walk in the shoes of another party,” said Marietta. So far researchers have tested the game on adults and a few middle school students, but they are looking for more test subjects.

The researchers used a virtual world created in Unity, a web-based application that could be easily used in schools. They’d like to build out a virtual school so that students could interact with peers and teachers in different ways, helping them gain skills in social perspective taking that would allow them to build positive relationships within a school context, hopefully leading to greater academic and social success.

The research team sees the technique as widely applicable since communication and negotiation can so easily break down in any context. Teacher training, language development and management training could all benefit from the ability to understand the perspective of another. Researchers also hypothesize the technique could work well with bullies.

Flickr: USAGHumphreys/Toca Boca

By Björn Jeffery and Michael H. Levine

All over the world—from East Asia to South Africa to the Caribbean Basin—ministers of government, captains of industry, and scholars are discussing the best ways to foment innovation. Many experts still regard the United States as a leader in promoting creative uses of capital, technology, and people, with unrivaled access to new ideas and cultures—all prerequisites for innovation. Others point out that open societies value—and foster—creativity.

But can we measure creativity? And if so, what is the best way to promote it right from the start? A new working paper published by the Global Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development OECD for the Centre for Real-World Learning at the University of Winchester in England defines creativity as focused on five core dispositions. Anne Murphy Paul’s Brilliant Blog (one of our favorites) reports that their research finds that a creative mind is Inquisitive: wondering and questioning; Persistent: sticking with difficulty, daring to be different; Imaginative: playing with possibilities, making connections, Collaborative: sharing, giving and receiving feedback; cooperating and Disciplined: developing techniques, reflecting critically.

As experts in media creation for families and young children, we wondered whether there are specific ways to navigate through the sometimes overwhelming deluge of content available to young children in the apps marketplace; we were looking specifically for apps that speak to these five “seeds of creativity.” Stated simply: we think so! The remarkable ongoing appeal of educational media properties like Sesame Street—which has endured over 40 years of market tumult and change and now reaches some 125 million children in 150 countries, and more recently the global phenomenon of apps and games in the market proves that playful, creative products consumed not just by kids alone, but with the adults around them, can be both fun and engaging.

As the recent report Pioneering Literacy in the Digital Wild West makes clear, the apps market for young children is robust, but the content is disappointing. Educational apps are usually ‘‘skill and drill,” and many of those that pass for storytelling or complex literacy experiences leave much to be desired. Here are some of the design choices that Toca Boca has made in order to be both a commercial market success and to pioneer “creative expression” in the Wild West. Not coincidentally, these same lessons also pertain to the remarkable run that Sesame has had for over four decades.

Focus on Playful and Imaginative Learning

Kids crave playful, imagination-based, inquisitive learning, but they hate most “educational games,” which to their palates taste like a “spinach sundae.”  Kids are honest critics—sometimes brutally honest! They won’t give a boring product a second chance. The only way of knowing if it is fun enough is to test with kids directly. Companies that create valuable educational games take their constituency seriously. Sesame Workshop—now entering its 44^th “experimental” season in the United States—still provides “formative testing” on every major new line of work with children themselves. Toca Boca cancelled projects simply because kids didn’t like them. When game and app developers start with a goal that adults like (i.e., “Let’s make kids eat healthy food”) and try to make that fun, sometimes it works, but often it doesn’t. As Jim Henson and others found long ago: start with the fun and make it stick. The creative process is the best way to unleash educational power.

Failure is an Option: Persistence Matters and Risks are Good

Seen any coloring books with princesses? What about memory games with farm animals? While imitation has been called the most sincere form of flattery, we find that the work of so many developers is too often predictable and boring. To avoid clichés, take some risks! Just because no one has done it before doesn’t mean that it won’t work. Sesame Workshop has pioneered work in areas ranging from social issues (loss and divorce, economic uncertainty, resilience in military families) to cultural memes like Cookie Monster’s efforts to cut back on his addiction to sweets.  Recently the Workshop’s value as a cultural icon was reinforced when its YouTube channel, which includes both vintage “old school” videos as well as newer content, reached 1 billion views—the first non-profit to reach that peak. Toca Boca’s content is new, but based on classic play patterns in a touch-screen environment. The theme can be familiar, but the concept and the interaction of the toy or app should evoke something special, perhaps including inter-generational appeal. If you test it and you get the right reactions from kids and the adults in their lives, then you are onto something.

Target a Global, Interactive Community

The App Store is a difficult market to penetrate —as of March 2013, there were nearly 800k apps in the iTunes store alone that’s a lot of competition. The way Toca Boca has attempted to distinguish itself is by designing apps without unnecessary text and voice. Kids should be able to have fun with the apps without sitting through long instructions. What’s more, localization is built in to the experience—kids all over the world are experiencing the exact same product. At Sesame, a different approach works: the Muppets are localized to meet the cultural and educational needs defined by the people who know children best. Today’s apps can be sold in more than 150 countries worldwide—why not make the most of that? Let’s build a community of kids who are presenting their own creations as the next generation of content creators.

Design for All

Let’s design toys not for boys or girls, but for all kids. Let families decide for themselves what they want to have fun with. Both Sesame Workshop and Toca Boca aim to meet the needs of all children at different developmental levels.

Go Your Own Way

To quote Fleetwood Mac, designers should go their own way! Although it’s part of a book publisher with access to existing stories, Toca Boca avoided all third-party characters and created original products. Sure—a world famous brand will help with some recognition, but is the brand made to be interactive? Only sometimes. While Sesame Street maintains its brand equity with great dexterity, and has unique intergenerational appeal, Toca Boca is a case study that shows that you don’t need a big, well-recognized brand to succeed today. Need another example? Think about a familiar series of apps about some birds that are upset.

Building creative apps demands something old and something new. Our organizations have distinct approaches, but there’s a strong common thread: to create digital canvases and tools that allow kids to produce their own stories and to promote generational currency so that young children can also learn from adults and peers.

There’s so much more to do, and tens of millions of kids—especially in those nations that are looking for “an innovation edge” now face a paucity of fun and creative play experiences. So fellow developers, drop the princesses, the phonemes and the memory games and give something new a go!

Michael Levine, Ph.D. is founding executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, an independent research and innovation lab focusing on education, children, and media. Bjorn Jeffery is CEO and founder of Toca Boca, a digital game studio that currently has nine out of the top 25 Education apps for iPhone in the U.S. and eight on iPad.

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By Shankar Vedantam

For some years now, teachers and parents have noted something about boys and girls. Starting in elementary school, young girls often score better on reading and math tests than young boys do.

The differences are uneven on different tests and do not describe the experience of every child, but empirical studies do document a difference.

Now, two economists are proposing a partial explanation for the disparity that might give some parents heartburn.

Michael Baker at the University of Toronto and Kevin Milligan at the University of British Columbia recently analyzed survey data of parents in three countries — the United States, Canada and Britain. They were especially interested to see how parents say they spend time with their children — and they turned up an intriguing gender difference in what they called “teaching activities.”

“So, this would be, ‘How often do you read with your child?’ or ‘Do you teach them the alphabet or numbers?’ ” Baker says. “Systematically parents spent more time doing these activities with girls.”

The finding surprised them because, at least in popular lore, parents supposedly spend more time with boys than girls. And Baker says that perception does tend to hold true for older children — fathers tend to spend more time with boys once they are older than age 4 or 5. When children are smaller, Baker says, parents spend about the same total time with boys as they do with girls.

But the striking difference comes in the sorts of activities the parents said they engage the kids in. The survey data suggests that young girls are more likely to be taken to libraries than are boys, are more likely to own books than are boys, and are more likely to be read to for longer periods of time than boys.

The economists focused their analysis, recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, on first-born children in order to get at the disparity in parental investment. It would have muddied the waters to compare parents caring for an only child with parents caring for their second or third child, Baker says. But they did find that the disparity also shows up clearly among fraternal twins. Here again, the parents surveyed seemed to devote more time to girls when it came to cognitive activities.

Since parents say they spend the same amount of time overall with boys and girls, Baker’s analysis suggests that if parents are spending more time with girls on cognitive activities, they must be spending more time with boys on other kinds of activities. While it’s possible to speculate that those activities involve more active play, Baker says the surveys could not provide a definite answer.

The big question, of course, is why these disparities in parental investment come about at all. After all, as Baker notes, many parents are familiar with research showing that elementary school boys trail girls in test of vocabulary and math. And they’ve also likely heard about studies suggesting that early interventions might have a big impact on the lives of children.

Milligan says the short answer is that no one knows why parents spend more time with girls on cognitive activities. One theory holds that girls might have a greater inclination toward such activities. (Theories suggesting innate differences between boys and girls and between men and women are hotly debated.) Another theory is that parents may be following cultural scripts and unconscious biases that suggest they should read with their daughters, and have active play with sons.

It is also possible, Baker says, that the costs of investing in cognitive activities is different when it comes to boys and girls. As an economist, he isn’t referring to cost in the sense of cash; he means cost in the sense of effort.

“It is just more costly to provide a unit of reading to a boy than to a girl because the boy doesn’t sit still, you know, doesn’t pay attention,” he says, “these sorts of things.”

Baker says that as the parent of a boy and girl, he noticed that his own daughter appeared to have a greater inclination toward cognitive activities than his son. Rather than theorize about what the difference might be about, he says, he and his wife systematically directed their boy toward more cognitive activities.

Flickr: Ben Seidelman

Using tech tools that students are familiar with and already enjoy using is attractive to educators, but getting students focused on the project at hand might be more difficult because of it.

Living rooms, dens, kitchens, even bedrooms: Investigators followed students into the spaces where homework gets done. Pens poised over their “study observation forms,” the observers watched intently as the students—in middle school, high school, and college, 263 in all—opened their books and turned on their computers.

For a quarter of an hour, the investigators from the lab of Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University-Dominguez Hills, marked down once a minute what the students were doing as they studied. A checklist on the form included: reading a book, writing on paper, typing on the computer—and also using email, looking at Facebook, engaging in instant messaging, texting, talking on the phone, watching television, listening to music, surfing the web. Sitting unobtrusively at the back of the room, the observers counted the number of windows open on the students’ screens and noted whether the students were wearing ear-buds.

Although the students had been told at the outset that they should “study something important, including homework, an upcoming examination or project, or reading a book for a course,” it wasn’t long before their attention drifted: Students’ “on-task behavior” started declining around the two-minute mark as they began responding to arriving texts or checking their Facebook feeds. By the time the 15 minutes were up, they had spent only about 65 percent of the observation period actually doing their schoolwork.

“We were amazed at how frequently they multitasked, even though they knew someone was watching,” Rosen says. “It really seems that they could not go for 15 minutes without engaging their devices,” adding, “It was kind of scary, actually.”

Concern about young people’s use of technology is nothing new, of course. But Rosen’s study, published in the May issue of Computers in Human Behavior, is part of a growing body of research focused on a very particular use of technology: media multitasking while learning. Attending to multiple streams of information and entertainment while studying, doing homework, or even sitting in class has become common behavior among young people—so common that many of them rarely write a paper or complete a problem set any other way.

But evidence from psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience suggests that when students multitask while doing schoolwork, their learning is far spottier and shallower than if the work had their full attention. They understand and remember less, and they have greater difficulty transferring their learning to new contexts. So detrimental is this practice that some researchers are proposing that a new prerequisite for academic and even professional success—the new marshmallow test of self-discipline—is the ability to resist a blinking inbox or a buzzing phone.

The media multitasking habit starts early. In “Generation M²: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds,” a survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and published in 2010, almost a third of those surveyed said that when they were doing homework, “most of the time” they were also watching TV, texting, listening to music, or using some other medium. The lead author of the study was Victoria Rideout, then a vice president at Kaiser and now an independent research and policy consultant. Although the study looked at all aspects of kids’ media use, Rideout told me she was particularly troubled by its findings regarding media multitasking while doing schoolwork.

“This is a concern we should have distinct from worrying about how much kids are online or how much kids are media multitasking overall. It’s multitasking while learning that has the biggest potential downside,” she says. “I don’t care if a kid wants to tweet while she’s watching American Idol, or have music on while he plays a video game. But when students are doing serious work with their minds, they have to have focus.”

For older students, the media multitasking habit extends into the classroom. While most middle and high school students don’t have the opportunity to text, email, and surf the Internet during class, studies show the practice is nearly universal among students in college and professional school. One large survey found that 80 percent of college students admit to texting during class; 15 percent say they send 11 or more texts in a single class period.

During the first meeting of his courses, Rosen makes a practice of calling on a student who is busy with his phone. “I ask him, ‘What was on the slide I just showed to the class?’ The student always pulls a blank,” Rosen reports. “Young people have a wildly inflated idea of how many things they can attend to at once, and this demonstration helps drive the point home: If you’re paying attention to your phone, you’re not paying attention to what’s going on in class.” Other professors have taken a more surreptitious approach, installing electronic spyware or planting human observers to record whether students are taking notes on their laptops or using them for other, unauthorized purposes.

Such steps may seem excessive, even paranoid: After all, isn’t technology increasingly becoming an intentional part of classroom activities and homework assignments? Educators are using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as well as social sites created just for schools, such as Edmodo, to communicate with students, take class polls, assign homework, and have students collaborate on projects. But researchers are concerned about the use of laptops, tablets, cell phones, and other technology for purposes quite apart from schoolwork. Now that these devices have been admitted into classrooms and study spaces, it has proven difficult to police the line between their approved and illicit use by students.

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In the study involving spyware, for example, two professors of business administration at the University of Vermont found that “students engage in substantial multitasking behavior with their laptops and have non course-related software applications open and active about 42 percent of the time.” The professors, James Kraushaar and David Novak, obtained students’ permission before installing the monitoring software on their computers—so, as in Rosen’s study, the students were engaging in flagrant multitasking even though they knew their actions were being recorded.

Another study, carried out at St. John’s University in New York, used human observers stationed at the back of the classroom to record the technological activities of law students. The spies reported that 58 percent of second- and third-year law students who had laptops in class were using them for “non-class purposes” more than half the time. (First-year students were far more likely to use their computers for taking notes, although an observer did note one first-year student texting just 17 minutes into her very first class—the beginning of her law school career.)

CAN THE BRAIN MULTITASK?

Texting, emailing, and posting on Facebook and other social media sites are by far the most common digital activities students undertake while learning, according to Rosen. That’s a problem, because these operations are actually quite mentally complex, and they draw on the same mental resources—using language, parsing meaning—demanded by schoolwork.

David Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan who’s studied the effects of divided attention on learning, takes a firm line on the brain’s ability to multitask: “Under most conditions, the brain simply cannot do two complex tasks at the same time. It can happen only when the two tasks are both very simple and when they don’t compete with each other for the same mental resources. An example would be folding laundry and listening to the weather report on the radio. That’s fine. But listening to a lecture while texting, or doing homework and being on Facebook—each of these tasks is very demanding, and each of them uses the same area of the brain, the prefrontal cortex.”

Young people think they can perform two challenging tasks at once, Meyer acknowledges, but “they are deluded,” he declares. It’s difficult for anyone to properly evaluate how well his or her own mental processes are operating, he points out, because most of these processes are unconscious. And, Meyer adds, “there’s nothing magical about the brains of so-called ‘digital natives’ that keeps them from suffering the inefficiencies of multitasking. They may like to do it, they may even be addicted to it, but there’s no getting around the fact that it’s far better to focus on one task from start to finish.”

Erin Scott

Researchers have documented a cascade of negative outcomes that occurs when students multitask while doing schoolwork. First, the assignment takes longer to complete, because of the time spent on distracting activities and because, upon returning to the assignment, the student has to re-familiarize himself with the material.

Second, the mental fatigue caused by repeatedly dropping and picking up a mental thread leads to more mistakes. The cognitive cost of such task-switching is especially high when students alternate between tasks that call for different sets of expressive “rules”—the formal, precise language required for an English essay, for example, and the casual, friendly tone of an email to a friend.

Third, students’ subsequent memory of what they’re working on will be impaired if their attention is divided. Although we often assume that our memories fail at the moment we can’t recall a fact or concept, the failure may actually have occurred earlier, at the time we originally saved, or encoded, the memory. The moment of encoding is what matters most for retention, and dozens of laboratory studies have demonstrated that when our attention is divided during encoding, we remember that piece of information less well—or not at all. As the unlucky student spotlighted by Rosen can attest, we can’t remember something that never really entered our consciousness in the first place. And a study last month showed that students who multitask on laptops in class distract not just themselves but also their peers who see what they’re doing.

Fourth, some research has suggested that when we’re distracted, our brains actually process and store information in different, less useful ways. In a 2006 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Russell Poldrack of the University of Texas-Austin and two colleagues asked participants to engage in a learning activity on a computer while also carrying out a second task, counting musical tones that sounded while they worked. Study subjects who did both tasks at once appeared to learn just as well as subjects who did the first task by itself. But upon further probing, the former group proved much less adept at extending and extrapolating their new knowledge to novel contexts—a key capacity that psychologists call transfer.

Brain scans taken during Poldrack’s experiment revealed that different regions of the brain were active under the two conditions, indicating that the brain engages in a different form of memory when forced to pay attention to two streams of information at once. The results suggest, the scientists wrote, that “even if distraction does not decrease the overall level of learning, it can result in the acquisition of knowledge that can be applied less flexibly in new situations.”

Finally, researchers are beginning to demonstrate that media multitasking while learning is negatively associated with students’ grades. In Rosen’s study, students who used Facebook during the 15-minute observation period had lower grade-point averages than those who didn’t go on the site. And two recent studies by Reynol Junco, a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, found that texting and using Facebook—in class and while doing

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homework—were negatively correlated with college students’ GPAs. “Engaging in Facebook use or texting while trying to complete schoolwork may tax students’ capacity for cognitive processing and preclude deeper learning,” write Junco and a coauthor. (Of course, it’s also plausible that the texting and Facebooking students are those with less willpower or motivation, and thus likely to have lower GPAs even aside from their use of technology.)

HELPING KIDS PRIORITIZE

Meyer, of the University of Michigan, worries that the problem goes beyond poor grades. “There’s a definite possibility that we are raising a generation that is learning more shallowly than young people in the past,” he says. “The depth of their processing of information is considerably less, because of all the distractions available to them as they learn.”

Given that these distractions aren’t going away, academic and even professional achievement may depend on the ability to ignore digital temptations while learning—a feat akin to the famous marshmallow test. In a series of experiments conducted more than 40 years ago, psychologist Walter Mischel tempted young children with a marshmallow, telling them they could have two of the treats if they put off eating one right away. Follow-up studies performed years later found that the kids who were better able to delay gratification not only achieved higher grades and test scores but were also more likely to succeed in school and their careers.

Two years ago, Rosen and his colleagues conducted an information-age version of the marshmallow test. College students who participated in the study were asked to watch a 30-minute videotaped lecture, during which some were sent eight text messages while others were sent four or zero text messages. Those who were interrupted more often scored worse on a test of the lecture’s content; more interestingly, those who responded to the experimenters’ texts right away scored significantly worse than those participants who waited to reply until the lecture was over.

This ability to resist the lure of technology can be consciously cultivated, Rosen maintains. He advises students to take “tech breaks” to satisfy their cravings for electronic communication: After they’ve labored on their schoolwork uninterrupted for 15 minutes, they can allow themselves two minutes to text, check websites, and post to their hearts’ content. Then the devices get turned off for another 15 minutes of academics.

Over time, Rosen says, students are able extend their working time to 20, 30, even 45 minutes, as long as they know that an opportunity to get online awaits. “Young people’s technology use is really about quelling anxiety,” he contends. “They don’t want to miss out. They don’t want to be the last person to hear some news, or the ninth person to ‘like’ someone’s post.” Device-checking is a compulsive behavior that must be managed, he says, if young people are to learn and perform at their best.

Rideout, director of the Kaiser study on kids and media use, sees an upside for parents in the new focus on multitasking while learning. “The good thing about this phenomenon is that it’s a relatively discrete behavior that parents actually can do something about,” she says. “It would be hard to enforce a total ban on media multitasking, but parents can draw a line when it comes to homework and studying—telling their kids, ‘This is a time when you will concentrate on just one thing.’ ”

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Parents shouldn’t feel like ogres when they do so, she adds. “It’s important to remember that while a lot of kids do media multitask while doing homework, a lot of them don’t. One out of five kids in our study said they ‘never’ engage in other media while doing homework, and another one in five said they do so only ‘a little bit.’ This is not some universal norm that students and parents can’t buck. This is not an unreasonable thing to ask of your kid.”

So here’s the takeaway for parents of Generation M: Stop fretting about how much they’re on Facebook. Don’t harass them about how much they play video games. The digital native boosters are right that this is the social and emotional world in which young people live. Just make sure when they’re doing schoolwork, the cell phones are silent, the video screens are dark, and that every last window is closed but one.

This story was produced by MindShift in conjunction with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University and Slate.