Haste makes waste?

Michael Shayer of King’s College London has been testing children’s thinking skills since 1976, when he and colleagues started studying the development of reasoning abilities in young people. In 2006 and 2007 he got 14-year-olds to take some of the same tests as 30 years earlier. The findings, to be published early
next year, are sobering. More than a fifth of youngsters got high scores then, suggesting they were developing the ability to formulate and test hypotheses. Now only a tenth do.

The tests did not change, so the decline was not caused by different content or marking. And since they explored the ability to think deeply rather than to regurgitate information or whizz through tasks, the results matter deeply. In the purest test of reasoning, pupils were shown a pendulum and asked how to
find out what affects the rate at which it swings. “Their answers indicated whether they had progressed from the descriptive thinking that gets us through most of our days, to the interpretative thinking needed to analyse complex information and formulate and test hypotheses,” Professor Shayer explains.

In 1976 more boys than girls did well, a fact the researchers put down to boys roaming further out of doors and playing more with tools and mechanical toys. Both sexes now do worse than before, but boys’ scores have fallen more, suggesting that a decline in outdoor and hands-on play has slowed cognitive development in both sexes. Britain’s unusually early start to formal education may make things worse, as
infants are diverted from useful activities such as making sand-castles and playing with water into unhelpful ones, such as holding a pen and forming letters.

from the latest issue of The Economist, Nov 1, 2008