What role do you think gadgets play in the problem
Answers
The children returning to school this week with their new Christmas gadgets don’t remember a world without smartphones, tablets, e-readers and laptops. For some, this generation of digital natives are using technology in collaborative and social ways that will revolutionise learning. Others worry about the damage these devices are doing to their concentration spans and their ability to think deeply.
So what is the truth about technology and education? Is it better to read War and Peace on a Kindle or on paper? Or should we forgo 19th-century novels completely in favour of co-creating our own stories on Facebook? As a recent New Scientist article acknowledged, the rapid pace of technological change means large-scale studies of many of these issues are lacking. However, there is some reliable research.For example, there’s good evidence that one of the most popular claims made for technology is false. It has been said by many – from headteachers to union reps to Today presenters – that the internet reduces the importance of knowing facts. However, research from cognitive science shows the vital importance of remembering facts. When we think, we use working memory and long-term memory. Long-term memory is vast, but working memory is limited to about four to seven items and is easily overloaded. By committing facts to long-term memory, we free up precious space in our working memory to manipulate those facts and combine them with new ones.
That’s why it’s so important for pupils to learn their times tables: memorising them doesn’t stifle conceptual understanding but rather enables it. We also need a framework of facts in long-term memory to make sense of what we find on the internet; studies show that pupils frequently make errors when asked to look up unfamiliar knowledge. Long-term memory is not a bolted-on part of the mind that we can outsource to the cloud. It is integral to all our thinking processes; researchers even suggest it may be “the seat of human intellectual skill”.