How much college tuition did you spend to expand your mind and increase your chances? If costs came out of your own pocket ... you'd be interested to know how pillars of pedagogy stand under new scrutiny. Simply put, new questions are being asked with the brain in mind, and answers are turning heads
Recent research affirms troubling news that college classes can create mental decline in later years. The research also seems to support that fact that lectures clearly work again the human brain.
If college degrees seemed a no-brainer … and if higher education promised a bonus in business … you may wish to take another look.
Research now suggests that college actually tends to trigger mental decline when people comes to fumbling for words and ideas later in life.
Research results in the study raise compelling questions. Participants who were all past 70 years old were tested up to four times between 1993 and 2000. Evaluations focused on their personal ability to recall 10 common words that were read aloud to them.
Surprisingly, people with more education were found to show significantly steeper decline over the years in measures of verbal memory. In other words, their mental ability failed to help them remember learned word lists.
Check out this study’s details in the current issue of the journal Research on Aging.
Here’s my question … Could this mental decline arise from the fact that lectures work against people’s ability to store and use innovative ideas given at college? Perhaps you've noticed ... as I have ... that more college professionals lately … are asking questions that could help to restructure learning with benefits that last.
Could these results also transform your workplace?
As plastic as the brain is, I doubt that lectures in college and high school are going to be the culprits in memory loss a half century later. Besides we need to know much more about the people who were studied. The degree experience, for example, is very different.
My experience, never going to class, but showing up to take tests resulted in a degree. My friend went to a small liberal arts college where classes were mostly discussion. My daughter went to a large school for both her undergraduate and MBA. We all have degrees. Only one of us suffered dramatic exposure to lecture.
That's not all we don't know. We don't know their majors. We don't know about medical and family histories. In other words, the study is doesn't have much to tell us, but does encourage us to ask a lot of questions.
Posted by: Wally Bock | December 2, 2007 5:06 PM | Permalink to Comment