Over the course of the pandemic, we’ve paid a lot of attention to
how far students have fallen behind academically, in math and reading
especially. Though I wish we would pay more attention to COVID learning loss,
academic achievement is only one aspect of how students develop intellectually.
Another aspect that I am particularly concerned about in light of the pandemic—one
that hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention—is cognitive development.

The brain is like a repository of skills and information, but it’s also like a muscle. Making sure that students capture skills and information is distinct from making sure that muscle gets enough exercise. The latest episode of my podcast, The Report Card, examines new research on one aspect of the brain-as-muscle phenomenon, cognitive endurance, that has serious implications for schooling and how students may have lost out during the pandemic.

Cognitive endurance is our ability to sustain performance over time, and a recent working paper, “Cognitive Endurance as Human Capital,” by Christina Brown, Supreet Kaur, Geeta Kingdon, and Heather Schofield, sheds light on how students develop this ability.

The paper’s findings were drawn from a field experiment with over
1,600 students in first through sixth grade in India. Students were randomly assigned
to three groups: a control group that sat in study hall solving math problems
at their leisure, one treatment group that actively engaged in solving
cognitively demanding puzzles such as mazes and tangrams, and another treatment
group that actively engaged in solving tough math problems that weren’t directly
related to the content in students’ math classes. For more specifics, you
should read the paper—it is both interesting and highly readable—but the core question was whether practicing
tasks that require sustained concentration could lessen student performance
declines on the back half of a test.

Both treatments increased students’ cognitive endurance on measures
unrelated to the content of the treatment exercises. After working to rule out
alternative explanations for that improvement, the authors convincingly show that
students’ improved performance on tests stemmed from improved cognitive
endurance, not content knowledge or something else. What’s more, the effects persisted
for months.

The authors work hard to show that cognitive endurance and
academic ability work at least somewhat independently. In particular, the maze
and tangram treatment—hardly the traditional path to better test scores—improved
students’ cognitive endurance without them learning any new content.

Through the experiment and other evidence, the authors also show
the converse: not all academic work is equally beneficial for cognitive
endurance. Work that both requires sustained attention and is cognitively
demanding is better for improving cognitive endurance than work that isn’t. This
has implications for schools because, as the authors argue, the quality of schooling
matters for cognitive endurance.

This brings us to my concerns about student development. It’s hard
to believe pandemic schooling increased the sustained concentration-demanding
work that this experiment shows improves cognitive endurance. When students
were learning remotely and teachers’ supervision was distant, losing focus, getting
distracted by devices, or just checking out was far too easy. Especially in the
early months of the pandemic, a lot of schooling simply consisted in filling
out workbooks and worksheets. But beyond early closures, the remote instruction
and staffing challenges of the last two years probably increased the time
students spent on unfocused work that resembled the study hall activities of
the experiment’s control arm.

For some time, I and many others have been clamoring for schools
to prioritize getting back to normal, and this aspect of cognitive endurance is
another reason why. The products of schooling appear over a longer term than tomorrow’s
test scores, and cognitive endurance matters a lot for long-term outcomes. It matters for college students
studying for tests, for doctors performing surgery, for workers operating
machinery, and for any other task that demands sustained attention. And
although we don’t know for sure, it seems likely that years of disrupted
schooling had big impacts on students’ cognitive endurance. Students might be
able to overcome learning loss, but will they be able to get back on track
cognitively?

The post Another Pandemic Schooling Concern: Cognitive Endurance appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.