Doctor on How Screen Time Hurts Kids' Cognitive Development

Thank you guys. Name is uh Dr. Jared

Cooney Horvath. I'm a former teacher

turned cognitive neuroscientist who

focuses on human learning. Um and I do

not receive funding nor have I ever from

big tech. Um

so a sad fact our generation has to face

this. Our kids are less cognitively

capable than we were at their age. Um

since we've been standardizing and

measuring cognitive development since

the late 1800s, every generation has

outperformed their parents. And that's

exactly what we want. We want sharper

kids. And the reason for this largely

has been school. Each generation spends

more time in school. We use school to

develop our cognition. Congratulations.

You see your correlation. Until Gen Z.

Gen Z is the first generation in modern

history to underperform us on basically

every cognitive measure we have from

basic attention to memory to literacy to

numeracy to executive functioning to

even general IQ even though they go to

more school than we did. So why? What

happened? What happened around 2010 that

decoupled schooling from cognitive

development? It can't be schools.

Schools basically look the same. It

can't be biology. This has had enough of

time to change. The answer appears to be

the tools we are using within schools to

drive that learning. across 80

countries. As Gan was just saying, if

you look at the data, once countries

adopt digital technology widely in

schools, performance goes down

significantly to the point where kids

who use computers about 5 hours per day

in school for learning purposes will

score over twothirds of a standard

deviation less than kids who rarely or

never touch tech at school. And that's

across 80 countries. Bring it home to

the US. Let's go to the US. We have our

NA. That's our big data. Take any state.

Here's here's a fun experiment you can

try. Take any state NAPE data, compare

that to when that state adopted onetoone

technology widely and watch what

happens. The NAPE data will plateau and

then start to drop. Now, as Jean said,

of course, this is all correlative. What

we really want is causitive. To get

causation, what you need is academic

research and you need mechanisms,

explanations for why we're seeing what

we're seeing. Luckily, we have academic

research stretching back to 1962 that

shows the exact same story for 60 years.

When tech enters education, learning

goes down. In fact, one of the biggest

um ed psychologists right now, Dylan

William out of the UK, recently said,

"Edte is a revolution that's been coming

for 60 years, and we're going to have to

wait another 60 because it ain't doing

anything."

Now, that's research, but now we need

mechanisms. Luckily, over the last about

two decades, we've been doing a lot of

work in what we call the science of

learning. How do human beings learn? And

we now have the clear understanding of

why tech does not work for learning. And

it is all biological. It's not that the

tech isn't being used well enough. We

haven't been trained enough. We need

better programs. It's we have evolved

biologically to learn from other human

beings, not from screens. And screens

circumvent that process. I won't go too

deeply into the mechanisms. They can get

boring, but just know they're there if

you want to talk about them. So that

leaves us with two options. Option one,

when you know something is wrong, do

better. So we could just say, hey, may a

culpa, get some of this tech out of

schools, go back to what we know works,

some analog methods. Cool.

Or two, we could redefine our terms. We

could redefine what it means to be an

effective learner. I want to end with

one quick story here. Think back to your

childhood, to your schooling. I

guarantee all of us at one point took a

test on reading comprehension. And the

way it looked is this. Here's a passage

of about 750 words. Here are 10 to 12

questions about that passage. Most of

them are inferential, not factual.

They're asking you to go beyond what you

just read to see what you understood.

Cool. Last year, the SATs had a reading

comprehension section. Here's what it

looked like. Here is a single sentence

of 75 words. Here is one question

fact-based about that that sentence.

Next. Here is another sentence of 75

words. Here is one question about that

sentence. Next. Last year, they

redefined reading comprehension to mean

54 short sentences with one question

about each. That is skimming. That's not

reading. Why would we ever do that?

Because what do kids do on computers?

They skim. So rather than determining

what do we want our children to do and

gearing education towards that, we are

redefining education to better suit the

tool. That's not progress, that is

surrender. So as we go through our

discussion today, there's going to be a

lot of talk about smartphones and and

social media, rightly so. But I'm the

voice here to remind you that even in

schools, it doesn't matter what the size

of the screen is. if it's a if it's a a

phone, if it's a laptop, if it's a

desktop, and it doesn't matter who

bought it. Is it school sanctioned? Does

it have the word education stamped on

it? It doesn't matter. All of these

things are also going to hurt learning,

which in turn are going to hurt our

kids' cognitive development right at the

time when we need our kids to be sharper

than we are. So, thank you guys so much

for today. I look forward to talking

with y'all.