Here is an article from last month’s Dallas Morning News that shows how inquiry and meaningful cognition in the library can benefit middle school students. If your district has had rumblings about cutting librarians at the middle school level, think about how you can leverage this research to promote quality learning in school libraries:

University of Texas at Dallas scientists believe they are on the road to success in overcoming the failure of many teenagers to develop the ability to reason to solve daily problems. 

 

Now they just need a little outside help – about $20 million – to expand their findings and put them into practice.Dr. Sandra Bond Chapman, chief director of UTD’s Center for BrainHealth, said existing studies have shown the brain undergoes more change during the teen years than at any other time except for the first two months of life.

 

“The frontal lobes, the area of the brain associated with critical thinking and reasoning, develop rapidly throughout adolescence,” Dr. Chapman said. “High-level reasoning and critical thinking are skills that have to be learned and practiced. If teens do not acquire the ability to learn strategically during this developmental period, they might never do so.”

 

Center for BrainHealth researchers believed that the middle school years would be the optimal time for training in complex reasoning skills, critical thinking skills and risk resilience.

 

Their initial studies show they were right.

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Hmmm … check out this study reported in Newsweek:

Is technology changing our brains? A new study by UCLA neuroscientist Gary Small adds to a growing body of research that says it is. And according to Small’s new book, “iBRAIN: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind,” a dramatic shift in how we gather information and communicate with one another has touched off an era of rapid evolution that may ultimately change the human brain as we know it. “Perhaps not since early man first discovered how to use a tool has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically,” he writes. “As the brain evolves and shifts its focus towards new technological skills, it drifts away from fundamental social skills.”

The impact of technology on our circuitry should not come as a surprise. The brain’s plasticity—it’s ability to change in response to different stimuli—is well known. Professional musicians have more gray matter in brain regions responsible for planning finger movements. And athletes’ brains are bulkier in areas that control hand-eye coordination. That’s because the more time you devote to a specific activity, the stronger the neural pathways responsible for executing that activity become. So it makes sense that people who process a constant stream of digital information would have more neurons dedicated to filtering that information. Still, that’s not the same thing as evolution.

To see how the Internet might be rewiring us, Small and colleagues monitored the brains of 24 adults as they performed a simulated Web search, and again as they read a page of text. During the Web search, those who reported using the Internet regularly in their everyday lives showed twice as much signaling in brain regions responsible for decision-making and complex reasoning, compared with those who had limited Internet exposure. The findings, to be published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, suggest that Internet use enhances the brain’s capacity to be stimulated, and that Internet reading activates more brain regions than printed words. The research adds to previous studies that have shown that the tech-savvy among us possess greater working memory (meaning they can store and retrieve more bits of information in the short term), are more adept at perceptual learning (that is, adjusting their perception of the world in response to changing information), and have better motor skills.

Really? So it’s OK to stay up all night reading The Librarian’s Guide to Etiquette? It’s actually making my brain smarter and not just snarkier? To quote my students, “SWEET!”

AASL Fall Forum kicks off today.  Hope to see many of you there.  Just a gentle reminder to back up your laptop files before you board that plane.Â