nology fundamentally changes the way people think, says Greenfield, who recently analyzed more than 50 studies on learning and technology, including research on multitasking and the use of computers, the Internet, and video games. As reading for pleasure has declined and visual media have exploded, noticeable changes have resulted, she notes.
“Reading enhances thinking and engages the imagination in a way that visual media such as video games and television do not,” Greenfield explains. “It develops imagination, induction, reflection, and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary.” However, she has found that visual media actually improve some types of information processing. Unfortunately, “most visual media are real-time media that do not allow time for reflection, analysis, or imagination,” she says. The upshot? Many people—particularly those who are younger—wind up not realizing their full intellectual potential.
Greenfield believes we’re watching an adaptation process unfold. Today, many individuals perform better at common tasks but this doesn’t make them better at thinking. The ability to multitask and use technology is highly beneficial in certain fields, including medicine, business, and flying aircraft. Consider: video game skills are a better predictor of surgeons’ success in performing laparoscopic surgery than actual laparoscopic surgery experience. One study found that the best video game players made 47% fewer errors and performed 39% faster in laparoscopic tasks than the worst video game players.
How society views technology has a great deal to do with how it forms perceptions about critical thinking. And nowhere is the conflict more apparent than at the intersection of video games and cognition. James Paul Gee, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, points out that things aren’t always as they appear. “There is a strong undercurrent of opinion that video and computer games aren’t healthy for kids,” he says. “The reality is that they are not only a major form of entertainment, they often provide a very good tool for learning.”
In fact, a growing number of researchers—and an expanding body of evidence—indicate that joysticks can go a long way toward building smarter children with better reasoning skills. Games such as Sim City, Civilization, Railroad Tycoon, and Age of Mythol-
ogy extend beyond the flat earth of rote memorization and teach decision-mak-ing and analytical skills in immersive, virtual environments that resemble the real world, Gee says. Moreover, these games—and some virtual worlds—give participants freedom to explore ideas and concepts that might otherwise be inaccessible or off limits.
Kurt Squire, a University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor in educational communications and technology, has found that as children play an educational game and learn about a particular period in history or an interesting concept, they often want to learn more. For example, one young student Squire studied sent him a list of 27 books on ancient history the boy had checked out of a library as a result of playing the game Civilization. What makes the games so compelling, he relates, is they create a psychological investment by “structuring problems so that they are just beyond students’ current abilities.”
One thing is certain. In the digital age, critical thinking is a topic that’s garnering greater attention. As reading and math scores decline on standardized tests, many observers argue that it’s time to take a closer look at technology and understand the subtleties of how it affects thinking and analysis. “Without critical thinking, we create trivia,” Bugeja concludes. “We dismantle scientific models and replace them with trendy or wishful ones that are neither transferable nor testable.”
Samuel Greengard is an author and freelance writer based in West Linn, OR.
© 2009 ACM 0001-0782/09/0700 $10.00
the royal society and the national academy of sciences were among the organizations that recently honored a select group of computer scientists.
The Ro YAL soCie TY feLLo Ws
peter Buneman, a professor
of database systems at the
university of edinburgh, and
dame wendy Hall, a professor
of computer science at the
university of southampton and aCM president, were among the 44 scientists elected as Fellows of the royal society.
nAs MeMBeRs the national academy of sciences elected 72 new members and 18 foreign associates from 15 countries in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in
original research. among the new appointees are three computer scientists: sir timothy Berners-lee, Massachusetts institute of technology; John e. Hopcroft, Cornell university; and Christos papadimitriou, university of California, Berkeley.
siRoCCo AWARD nicola santoro, a computer science professor at Carleton
university, won the prize for
innovation in distributed
Computing from the Colloquium
on structural information and
Communication Complexity
for his overall contribution
on the analysis of the labeled
graph properties that have been
shown to have a significant
impact on computability and
complexity in systems of
communication entities.
References:
Archives