Put this in the category of “I don’t know for certain, but I don’t think so.”
I have been to a number of presentations now in which “visionaries” describe today’s students as “different” than we are/were. I agree. Students are supposedly bored by today’s classrooms and today’s learning experiences. Again, I agree or at least I guess I agree. However, just for the sake of argument, how do we really know that this is really true. Perhaps kids in the 60s were really bored too, but were either afraid to say so then or by now have forgotten. Actually, if we could describe college-age students as students in this one-sided discussion, I could probably argue that today’s students are probably more “grade oriented” than the college students of my generation. Not necessarily the same thing as involved or interested, but clearly not rejecting “the establishment.” Anyway, I digress and should be doing a better job of focusing on my point.
During the type of visionary offering I have in mind, the presenter gets to a point at which he/she claims that students are used to “processing” multiple, simultaneous sources of information. There may be a reference to Sesame Street although other program references might now be more appropriate. Just to convince the audience that things have changed, the presenter displays a screen image from CNN or some similar source. The image shows an anchor person speaking, a graphic or video source, and a completely unrelated text stream scrolling at the bottom of the screen. This is not all. The presenter describes an imaginary student as watching this while talking on a cell phone, instant messaging, and listening to the stereo. True, this scenario is different than today’s teachers experienced as students.
This is where the logic of this presentation always gets a little fuzzy for me. If the message is classroom experiences are boring in comparison, I guess this position is probably valid. However, I always kind of get the impression the presenter is making an additional claim. The concern I have is that the claim is either that a new generation of humans has recently evolved to be capable of processing multiple unrelated streams of input or that the multi-input living room scene is a model for the ideal classroom. This is the point at which the research of developmental and cognitive psychologists might inform any assumptions being made. The developmental literature is a little far afield for me, but I know of no work demonstrating a generational progression in the capacity for handling multiple unrelated inputs. The cognitive literature I do follow . Older work (e.g., the impact of irrelevant images in children’s literature) and recent work with multimedia (e.g., Mayer – check spelling) argue that unnecessary information reduces processing efficiency and redundant information in the same modality can reduce learning. The issues here are different than the issue of “it is nice to have another input channel to attend to when the first channel becomes boring.”
Are younger people better at handling multiple inputs? My reactions is that this may be the wrong question to worry about. Consider this. I happen to like to channel surf and continually find myself rotating through 20 or so channels without realizing that I have lapsed into this “mode.” My wife hates this behavior. Somehow, I think I am actually following what is happening on CNN headline news, the baseball game, G4TechTV, the weather channel, etc. Would you be willing to conclude that my preference for this style of television viewing suggests much about what type of television programming should be developed for adult males?
OK, I feel better now. Learning experiences do need to be more engaging. The race has not evolved to require unrelated sensory experiences.
