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- Tags: aprendizaje cognición educación fav habilidades
[!summary]The ability to focus deeply is becoming rare and valuable in today’s fast-paced world. Disadvantaged students often have less mental stamina, but practicing sustained concentration can improve their performance. Relying too much on quick fixes like AI may weaken our capacity to think hard over time.
Highlights
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In fact, maintaining the ability to read complex books is akin to keeping a physical exercise regime. Physiologists talk about two different types of muscle fibre: fast-twitch and slow-twitch. Fast-twitch fibres contract quickly, and help us with short, high-load tasks like lifting a weight or sprinting. They’re highly responsive but tire quickly. Slow-twitch muscles contract more slowly but tire slowly too. They’re good for sustained, low-intensity tasks, like maintaining posture, and long-distance running. Cognitively speaking, the modern world offers us multiple opportunities to work our fast-twitch muscles. For knowledge workers at least, the workday is a stream of fast-twitch mental tasks. If you’re an information-hungry person, a constant stream of moderately demanding challenges is available to you: listen to this podcast about AI; solve today’s puzzle; become an instant expert on the Venezuelan oil industry. We’re not invited to exercise our slow-twitch muscles so often. The world is not urging us to immerse and isolate ourselves in a single, long, absorbing task without distractions; quite the opposite. Books do have this affordance, which is one reason the decline in reading should concern us. Novels, in particular, invite you to pay attention to details while keeping a whole world in your head; to see the wood and trees at once.
Buena metáfora
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The researchers also found evidence that the stamina gap can be closed with practice. As part of a randomised trial, two groups of the Indian students spent 10-20 hours practicing sustained concentration; one group in academic study, the other in cognitively demanding games. Across both groups, the students then showed 22% less performance decline on subsequent tests versus students who had done neither of these tasks. They had built up their cognitive endurance, and subsequently earned better grades across all subjects. The students who played cognitive games performed just as well as those who practiced maths problems.
Hay evidencia de que la endurance cognitiva se puede desarrollar.
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Depressingly, disadvantaged kids are also least likely to be in schools that train them in cognitive endurance. The TIMSS data shows that students in poor countries spend 40% less time in independent practice than those in rich countries. Poorer kids in the US spend 10% less time on it. The researchers identify classroom disruption and noise as a major barrier to kids being give the time and space to practice thinking like this. When teachers assign independent work, many students “end up disrupting other students.”
El contexto debe ser conducente al desarrollo de trabajo concentrado e independiente. Su disponibilidad correlaciona con el NSE de los establecimientos educativos.
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In many Western countries, including Britain, an emphasis on orderly classroom behaviour has somehow become coded as authoritarian and repressive. That’s disastrous for all students but particularly poorer ones. As Ed West has pointed out, many state schools seem to be shaped around the behaviour of the worst 5%, instead of the kids who want to learn. Labour is trying to make it harder to punish or exclude disruptive students, unable or unwilling to see that the burden of this policy falls hardest on disadvantaged kids. Meanwhile, apparent experts in education continue to insist that classrooms should be fun and sociable despite overwhelming evidence that real learning is slow and effortful and requires quiet study.
Planteamiento del endurance cognitivo y la necesidad de concentración para su desarrollo propone una interesante crítica a la lógica del aprendizaje activo, colaborativo o en base a proyectos. En general, estos discursos no privilegian el tiempo de reflexión individual.
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. When you get the AI to summarise that book, turn that paper into bullet-points, draft your essay, or design a system architecture, you don’t get to work your slow-twitch mental muscles, and without being exercised, they atrophy.