Children today may be less cognitively capable than previous generations, despite spending more time in school, a leading cognitive neuroscientist has told a US Senate committee.
Dr Jared Cooney Horvath, a former teacher turned researcher in human learning, said widespread use of digital technology in classrooms coincided with a long-term decline in key cognitive skills among young people.
He was speaking on 15 January during a hearing held by the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee on the impact of screen time on children and young adults.
A break in a long-running trend
For more than a century, each generation of children has consistently outperformed their parents on measures of cognitive ability, Dr Horvath said, a trend largely attributed to expanded schooling.
“That pattern ends with Gen Z,” he told lawmakers.
According to Dr Horvath, today’s students underperform older generations across a broad range of measures, including attention, memory, literacy, numeracy, executive function and general IQ, despite spending more years in formal education.
He argued that the decline could not be explained by changes in biology or the structure of schools, which he said had remained broadly similar for decades.
Instead, he pointed to the rapid adoption of digital technology in classrooms from around 2010 onwards.
Falling performance after digital adoption
Citing international assessments across 80 countries, Dr Horvath said academic performance consistently declined after schools introduced widespread computer use for learning.
Students who used computers for around five hours a day in school scored significantly lower, by more than two-thirds of a standard deviation, than those who rarely used digital devices in class, he said.
A similar pattern could be seen in the United States, he added, where national assessment scores typically plateaued and then fell after states adopted one-to-one device programmes for students.
While acknowledging that such data is correlational, Dr Horvath said decades of academic research pointed in the same direction.
“Whenever technology enters education, learning outcomes go down,” he told senators, citing studies dating back to the 1960s.
Why screens may undermine learning
Dr Horvath argued that the problem was not poor implementation or insufficient teacher training, but biology.
Humans, he said, evolved to learn from direct interaction with other people, and screen-based learning disrupts that process.
“Screens circumvent the way we are biologically designed to learn,” he said, adding that improvements in software or teaching apps were unlikely to resolve the issue.
Changing standards to fit the tool?
He also warned that education systems were beginning to redefine learning standards to accommodate digital habits, rather than shaping technology around educational goals.
As an example, he pointed to changes in reading comprehension tests, including the US SAT, which he said now focused on short, fact-based questions rather than extended passages requiring deeper understanding.
“That’s skimming, not reading,” he said, arguing that assessments were being redesigned to reflect how students interact with screens, rather than how comprehension should be measured.
A choice for policymakers
Dr Horvath said educators and policymakers faced a choice: reduce reliance on classroom technology and return to proven, non-digital methods, or continue reshaping education to suit screens.
He warned that failure to act could have lasting consequences.
“These tools don’t just affect learning,” he said. “They affect cognitive development, at the very moment when we need our children to be sharper than we are.”
Post a Comment for " Screen-based learning may be harming children’s cognitive development, US senators told"