Students are having trouble reasoning, remembering and multi-tasking due to brain changes caused by pandemic stress, reports Greg Toppo. He cites Nancy Tsai, a Harvard psychologist, lead author of a new study for MindPrint Learning.
Furthermore, teachers also are having trouble with cognitive tasks and executive function.
MindPrint, which periodically tests students and teachers using the Penn Computerized Neurocognitive Battery, gave the test to 35,000 students and 4,000 teachers nationwide.
"Children who attended elementary or pre-school during the pandemic and who are now 8 to13 years old showed the largest declines in memory," reports Toppo. Tsai believes younger children didn't get a chance to develop "core cognitive skills."
"Flexible thinking" was worse for all age groups, but especially for students from lower-income families. They declined more in verbal reasoning and verbal memory, which are linked to academic achievement in all subjects, compared to students from higher-income families.
"Teachers’ skills suffered in areas such as verbal and abstract reasoning, spatial perception, attention and working memory, but they saw the greatest losses in verbal memory and flexible thinking," reports Toppo.
Nancy Weinstein, Mindprint's CEO suggests teachers give students more skills practice, with rests between study sessions, and help students memorize by breaking material into smaller chunks.
More Americans, especially adults 18 to 44 years old, report problems with their memory and attention span, according to a Census survey, reports Francesca Paris in the New York Times.
"The increase started with the pandemic, but researchers aren't sure whether it's caused by stress, "long Covid" or something else.
Screen time went way up during the pandemic. Just saying.
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