The HumanNervous System

Neuroscience Talks to Teachers

Are today’s students different from those 20 years ago? I mean significantly, fundamentally different. If so, how are they different, why are they different, and what are the behaviors we see that result from this difference? If you look at educational trends over the past 75 years, you see evident shifts in at least four dimensions, or aspects of the classroom: 1. Technology use, 2. Changes in educational environments, 3. Expanding curriculum, and 4. Teacher-centered vs student-centered focus. These changes have had positive and negative effects on students. The positive effects include better access to educational opportunities and more opportunities for collaboration and community building, while the negative effects include higher anxiety levels, decreased attention spans, and social isolation. Social isolation, the lack of meaningful social relationships and support, is particularly troublesome and often difficult to detect early.  The ubiquitous use of cell phones by students, beginning in the early 2000s, has certainly contributed to these accelerating these effects.

The computerization of education was in full swing by 1980. The socioeconomic gap in access to technology, referred to as the digital divide, began soon after. Computer technology afforded greater consumption of information; good information, bad information, and age-inappropriate information. Then along came social media. Computers had a user, an individual accessing canned information. Social media has a multitude of users, and sometimes a mob, and they are generating social information continuously.

Students are more likely to be stressed, more anxious, wouldn’t you agree? A 2020 report by the American Psychological Association argued that stress in America has become a mental health crisis, and students are increasingly experiencing and reporting high levels of anxiety. We know that anxiety impairs performance, perception, memory, and mood. What is stressing these kids out, more so now than the kids 20 or 50 years ago? Let’s look at some consequences of those dimensional shifts to look for a pattern.

Research on screentime in students consistently shows that the more time students spend on their phone, the lower their grades and educational productivity, the shorter their attention span, and the greater their reported social isolation. It is generally accepted that social isolation can be the cause or result of violence and can contribute to aggressive and hostile behavior. What other factors might contribute to these negative consequences?

The classroom environment has significantly changed and has also had positive and negative consequences on student development. Enrollment rates have steadily increased in the past 50 years. The 2020 pandemic resulted in a slight decrease in enrollment for a short period of time. In 1950, the high school enrollment rates in this country were about 75% and rose to almost 95% by 2000. This increase meant that students were exposed to not only more children, but children from different cultures, religions, and ethnicities different from their own. This has helped our children to navigate an evolving social world, reduce prejudice, while enhancing their cognitive skills. But as you know, prejudice and hate have not gone away.

While enrollment increased, class sizes decreased. As more public funds became available, more schools were built. More teachers were formally trained and hired, many with postbaccalaureate degrees, and educational philosophies began to shift toward student-centered learning. The initiation suddenly of online and hybrid environments must have also affected students physically, emotionally, socially, and cognitively.

Today’s students experience an ever-expanding curriculum to keep up with our understanding of the world. While this is primarily a positive factor in their education, the perceived amount to learn and be tested on can be stressful. The advent of teacher-centered vs learner-centered approaches also had primarily positive outcomes. It did potentially increase some student anxiety as individual learner needs and abilities became more apparent. It was harder to get lost in the crowd, but not impossible.

There is evidence, in the journals and in the classroom, that our students today are significantly different from students 20 and 50 years ago. They are more likely to experience anxiety, stress, and social isolation. Combine this with the rising possibility of getting harmed at school and you have ample reasons for them (and teachers) to be hypervigilant, always on guard and stressed. We see all too often, we are experiencing a spike in school shootings in the past 20 years, with the last few years setting horrific and immoral records. We can look at the potential causes of this violence in a future post.

Is it really just their phones? Of course, the answer is no. Few things are that simple. Some uses of technology seem to have a more detrimental effect on students (and us) than others. We know internet addiction has many of the same physiological bases as drug addiction, for example, creating a reduction in the pleasure the user feels, and an increase in time spent supporting the addiction. This is done in the brain by downregulation of dopamine receptors. Dopamine is an important neurotransmitter, a chemical in the brain involved in movement, pleasure, and addiction.  The overstimulated brain reduces the number of active dopamine receptors. The person increases their behavior.

Internet addiction has been found to predict depression, stress, and negative educational outcomes. Recent work has found that short video addiction is worse. It impairs attention and has some of the same effects as drug addiction, including an inordinate amount of time spent on the activity at the cost of other physical and social activities.

Let’s think about those four dimensions again. Increasing technological engagement in education will continue. This interaction with technology will have positive and negative impacts on students. Groups of students might experience those impacts differently. The downstream effects include the virtual microscope of social media, social connection and isolation, and increasing anxiety associated with the educational environment. The ripples of effects from Covid and hybrid education are upon us now, aggravating the changes we see in some of our students. The expanding curriculum reflects our expanding understanding of the world. We will eventually create or discover the right language to understand why people behave the way they do and offer insights into improving the human experience and condition. Part of that language, I believe, is neuroscience.

Neuroscience is an umbrella term covering several sciences including neurobiology, neurochemistry, neurophysiology, neuropharmacology, neuroanatomy, psychology, statistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence. It informs neurology, neurosurgery, psychiatry, medicine, marketing, and teaching, to name just a few. Neuroscience research can be found in dozens of medical and research journals such as The Journal of Neuroscience, online at the National Institute for Health, and at scientific conferences such as the Society for Neuroscience. I have studied these subjects, read these journals, and attended these conferences just in case you haven’t had time. I hope to share with you some of what I have learned in the past 45 years in these posts.

What can neuroscience offer as potential approaches for improving student outcomes? I believe a better understanding of the brain and the human nervous system can afford specific and evidence-based strategies to help teachers cope with the additional demands of today’s students. Having a language to discuss what is normal and what is neurodivergent also equips teachers with tools and resources they can use. These posts are intended as a conversation we can have on what you need and what neuroscience can offer. In 1899, William James, the first American Psychologist and brother to author Henry James, published Talks to Teachers on Psychology. In this book, he introduced teachers to the emerging field of scientific psychology and how it could help teachers. He talked about behavior, attention, memory, the acquisition of ideas, and the stream or consciousness. In this series of posts, we are going to update some of his ideas and explore what neuroscience has to say about education: Neuroscience Talks to Teachers.