How to Build a Cognitive Training Plan | Monday Advice

I've been thinking recently about an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education that several of you sent me. It was titled My students can't read. Let me uh start here with the intro from the article. Here's what the intro of the article says. Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a twenty page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.

When I asked why a student answered honestly. It was too long and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. Now when we hear accounts like this, our normal response is to wring our hands and worry that we're raising sort of a new generation of kids that are barely literate. But here's the follow-up question that we need to also ask. Could you Read that twenty page article.

Like honestly, if you were given that much reading Are you still able to do it? See, I think if we pull on this thread a little bit harder, what soon becomes clear is that we don't really have a great way of quantitatively testing how fried our brains have actually become due to digital distraction. But we need these tests, right? Because in physical fitness. We have measures known as key performance indicators, like your BMI or how long it takes you to run a mile, that provide us a great way to get feedback on our physical health and gives us targets we can use to systematically work on improving. Well, here's my thought we need something similar.

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