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- Mathematics lecturer noticed the changes in her students after returning to teaching after a five-year break.
- She says her students and noticeably less engaged, increasingly on their smartphones or computers, and ask more "stupid questions."
- A batch of results from an ongoing National Institutes of Health study recently showed alarming results about the impacts that screen use has on developing brains.
Clio Cresswell, member of the Applied Mathematics Research Group, carrying out research in the area of Integrable Systems says her undergraduate students show a diminished capability for "linked thinking."
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Clio Cresswell, a mathematics lecturer at the University of Sydney and author of Mathematics and Sex, recently returned to the classroom after a five-year break from teaching math.
But
when she returned, she noticed an immediate difference in the ways in
which her undergraduate students engaged the class and material: They
showed a diminishing capability for "linked thinking," which is
presumably the ability to connect and make use of concepts from various
domains, similar to abstract thinking.
"These
days students are so busy posting on social media — 'love the burger',
'great fries' — that if something tragic happens to a loved one they
struggle to understand why they're feeling the way they do," Cresswell told The Weekend Australian. "They've trained themselves in first-step thinking. Their worlds are constructed of disconnected moments."
Whether
increased technology use is making students less able or likely to
engage in linked thinking, or other modes of thinking, is unclear. But
Cresswell said that, in her classrooms at least, she's noticed that
students have become markedly more passive...
Cresswell said this portends a major problem: Our society, which is
increasingly dependent on technology and algorithms, might soon be
divided into two groups: the few who understand math, and the vast
majority to whom it's a mystery.
