Marijuana Use Impedes Development in Young Brains

A series of studies indicate that teenagers who use marijuana are doing more than just flirting with a gateway drug: They’re probably doing lasting damage to their still-developing brains. A review from the University of Wisconsin, which examines data from studies on both teenage binge drinking and marijuana use, found that adolescents who use cannabis regularly earn lower grades, perform more poorly on IQ tests, and demonstrate lower cognitive function than peers who abstain.

Many short-term problems are associated with substance abuse in young people. Teenagers get less sleep, and sleep more poorly, when they are intoxicated, and being poorly rested may cause them to be less attentive in class and to operate with lower processing speed and working memory. Being under the influence of substances is also associated with poorer emotional regulation and risky decision-making.

But the UW review found that marijuana use presents more lasting dangers as well. Teenage brains exposed to marijuana may fail to develop properly. The damage was found to be particularly severe for teenagers who started younger or who used marijuana frequently. One longitudinal study revealed that young people who smoked marijuana on a regular basis during their teenage years lost an average of 8 IQ points as they transitioned from childhood to adulthood.

The teenage years are critical for brain development, and it seems that toxins in marijuana prevent the brain from doing the important work of pruning extraneous synapses and therefore working more efficiently.

It's important to keep in mind that the marijuana used by teens today differs from that which parents may have used in college. As noted by the University of Washington Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute, the potency of marijuana today is two to seven times what it was in the 1970's, as measured by the levels of THC, the active ingredient responsible for marijuana's psychoactive, or mood altering, effects. In addition, "another difference between then and now is that marijuana users in the 1970's were most likely to smoke the leaves and initiate use around 20 years of age. Marijuana users today, however, start in their mid-teens and prefer to smoke the more potent flowering tops, (buds) of the plant." Parents need to be mindful of these facts as they speak to their teens about the long term impact of early marijuana use. 

Illustration: National Institute on Drug Abuse

Major Changes to SAT by 2016

In the wake of reports of criticism about the SAT exam (which dropped the name "Scholastic Aptitude Test" years ago in the face of claims that it did not actually measure aptitude for college success), the College Board announced on Wednesday that it will be making a number of changes to the exam. The changes include:

• A return to the 1600-point scale. The overall score will be a composite of 800 possible points for its math and reading sections.

• The end of the mandatory essay. Students may choose to write an essay after completing the reading and math sections if they choose. However, instead of a personal essay in which they express an opinion or describe an experience, students will be asked to analyze a document. The essay will be given a separate score.

• A change to vocabulary words tested. Instead of words some deem esoteric, the College Board says the test will probe student’s knowledge of words that are commonly used in college courses. 

• A shift in math skills tested. The new SAT will focus on three areas: linear equations, complex equations, and ratios/percentages/proportional reasoning. Also, students will be allowed to use calculators for only some portions of the math section.

• Ending the penalty for wrong answers. The current test deducts a quarter of a point for each wrong answer (though there is no penalty for answers left blank). The “guessing penalty” will be removed from the new test.

• Analysis of science and social studies texts as part of the reading and writing section. Additionally, in some cases students will be asked to select not only the right answer, but also the textual quote that supports their answer.

One criticism of the SAT, and standardized testing in general, is that affluent students tend to do better, perhaps because they can afford access to test preparation courses. In hopes of leveling the playing field, the College Board has partnered with the Khan Academy to make practice and instructional materials available free of charge. Low-income students will receive another perquisite as well: Those who qualify will get four waivers that will allow them to apply to four colleges for free.

There is not yet any indication of how these changes will affect students with learning differences.

For more information, please visit the College Board’s webpage dedicated to the changes to the exam. 

Photo Credit: Flickr CC - Jeff Pioquinto, SJ

Great Sources for Frontloading Videos – Part 2

Our regular readers will remember last Monday's post on this topic in which we introduced MinutePhysics and MinuteEarth as sources for frontloading videos for middle and high school students. As we explained in the previous post, frontloading is an effective instructional technique in which students are given a brief overview of a topic before learning it more thoroughly. Frontloading gives students an idea of what to expect, helps them to focus on the salient information more readily, and aids in memory.

Here are two more sources for great videos, all available free! Handwritten Tutorials will be useful to students of high-level biology and anatomy, while CrashCourse offers a broader range of courses on science, literature, and history.

Handwritten Tutorials  – high school, college, and nursing/medical school

Martin Wardle, the brainy artist behind Handwritten Tutorials, follows three guidelines as he conceives and draws up his lectures: they should be under ten minutes long, free, and enjoyable to watch. Martin has uploaded more than 75 videos in which he quickly draws all of the most important aspects of topics like anatomy, biochemistry, neuroscience, and more, narrating all the while. The explanations are easy to understand and the helpful sketches make things crystal clear. Want to take a closer look, make your own notes, or spend a bit more time studying? Students can even download the completed drawing as a PDF from the Handwritten Tutorials homepage.

CrashCourse – high school and college

Teenagers who are fans of author John Green’s quirky humor will love this channel just as much as they love his popular novels, which we have recently reviewed in our Recommended Reads series. Brothers John and Hank Green take on the task of explaining U.S. and world history, chemistry and biology, literature, ecology, and psychology on this channel, which has dedicated playlists for each topic. The videos tend to be longer, between ten to twelve minutes, because they cover more ground than the Minute videos described above. The Greens’ fast-paced delivery, visuals (comprised of diagrams, photos, maps, and animations), and joke-a-second, cerebral humor will pique adolescents’ interest in the topic before they get into the nitty-gritty of learning it in detail. There are over 100 videos to choose from.

We hope that you’re as impressed by these videos as we are! We think any of them would make a wonderful starting point for more in-depth learning.

Great Sources for Frontloading Videos – Part 1

One of our favorite strategies here at the Yellin Center is frontloading. Frontloading is a great way to boost comprehension in almost all learners, and especially in students who struggle with attention and comprehension. The principle is simple: A preview of a concept, in which a learner is exposed to some of the most important ideas, tends to help students understand and absorb the information when they’re presented with more thorough instruction later. For example, if a student reads a short summary of a science chapter before reading the chapter itself, she tends to understand the complicated ideas in the chapter more easily. She knows, for example, which information is most important. She also has a sense of where the chapter is taking her as she reads and so can more easily build a schema in her mind.

Frontloading can take many forms, but one of our favorite ways to frontload is to take advantage of the treasure trove of information available on the internet. Videos are a great way to frontload for lots of reasons: they’re visual, engaging, move fairly quickly, and hold students’ attention. We want to share some great sources for frontloading videos, all of which are available, for free, on dedicated YouTube channels. Not only are the videos below great sources for information about physics and earth science, they’re all humorous and are characterized by quick but precise explanations and explanatory visuals, too. Students who spend a few minutes watching a video preview before they attempt to read a textbook chapter or attend the next day’s lecture on the same topic will more readily understand and remember the relevant information.

MinutePhysics – middle and high school

As the name suggests, this channel hosts a series of videos that explain topics important in physics, such as gravity, wave/particle duality, the mechanics of the sun, and even Schrodinger’s cat. At the time of this writing, there were 123 videos available, though new ones are added all the time. Most videos are between one and two minutes long.

MinuteEarth – middle and high school

Just like MinutePhysics, this channel is a gold mine for students learning earth science and geology. Viewers can learn about the properties of sand, how trees survive winter, where Earth’s water came from, and other topics, all in less than three minutes per video. So far the channel has 33 videos, but their collection is growing.

Stay tuned for a follow-up post in which we’ll share other favorite video sources!

Recommended Reads: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green*

Ages: High school

Plot: Adolescence is confusing. Young love is complicated. Hazel, our protagonist, is more intimately knowledgeable about these truths than most teenagers, as a sixteen-year-old with terminal cancer. A last-minute experiment with a new drug is temporarily holding her cancer at bay, but there is no question that she is living on borrowed time. Hazel is constantly accompanied by a cylinder of oxygen. This makes her unusual. But her relationship with Augustus, an irrepressible boy she meets at a cancer support group when he tags along with a friend, leaves her thrilled, dazed, insecure, and giddy. In other words, she’s also just about as normal as they come. The budding love between Hazel and Augustus is, naturally, doomed from the start. But they find wisdom and meaning and, ultimately, peace despite being impossibly star-crossed, and readers will walk away from the book feeling at once sober and joyful.

Our Take: John Green is one of the most admirable authors for young adults out there because he refuses to shy away from, or even water down, some of the biggest and toughest issues in life - not just life as a teenager, but capital-L-Life. Nowhere is this more apparent than in The Fault in Our Stars. A teenager with terminal cancer? Not featured in a sad side story but as the main character? Of a first-person novel? It doesn’t get much more blunt than that. Just as Green plows full steam ahead into territory that’s tough for adults to broach with kids – no matter that teenagers are talking and thinking about it anyway – he doesn’t hold back in making his books intelligent even though they are written for young people. In fact, maybe their intended audience is the very reason that Green’s books are so unabashedly authentic. We love the respect Green shows teenagers by writing books filled with references to Shakespeare and Dickinson (some identified and some subtle), witty characters, sophisticated vocabulary, and big, complicated, abstract ideas that kids will relish wrestling with. The Fault in Our Stars, as well as Green’s other novels, is the kind of book teens will think about. They’ll talk their friends about it. They’ll reread it, and it will guide them in a way that couldn’t be less pedantic or preachy toward the kind of introspection that teenagers aren’t exactly known for. We doubt that Green is even the smallest bit surprised at the sophisticated reactions his novels evoke in young readers, though. He clearly knows that they are more than capable.

To those worried that a book about the tragedy of a doomed teenager is exploitative or relies on shock value for its power, we simply say: Read it, and read it with an open mind. It’s a valid concern at the outset (one that concerned us, we admit, upon beginning The Fault in Our Stars), but this book is a valuable one both because of and in spite of Hazel’s bad luck.

Adult Content: Green refuses to condescend to young readers by skirting the sensitive topics that play roles in their lives, even if those topics make adults squirm. There is sex in this book (it is not gratuitous, and distracted readers might well miss it), Hazel drinks champagne in one scene, and there is some colorful language. Don’t be shocked. Your high school student won’t be.

*the author of Looking for Alaska, which we recently reviewed

Picmonic Uses Mnemonics to Make Science Memorable

Science, especially at the higher levels, can be especially challenging for students to learn. There’s much terminology to recall, and concepts are often so abstract that many learners struggle to keep up. Enter Picmonic (picture + mnemonic), an insightful and creative way to make seemingly arbitrary information truly memorable.

Picmonic uses an audiovisual method for teaching science. Although there is material for K-8th grader students, Picmonic specializes in medical content, making it a fantastic resource for students preparing for the MCAT or actually enrolled in medical school courses. Here’s how it works: Each concept is represented by a detailed, cartoonish picture depicting all of the important aspects. The relationship between the picture and the concept is tough to discern at first, but audio narration takes students through the different parts of the picture, explaining how each part of the image connects with real scientific concepts.

For instance, an 8th-grade-level card with a typically wacky tableau teaches about Charles Darwin and how he developed the theory of natural selection. The 80-second narration begins on the left, where a dolphin balances a cherry on its nose. “Cherry dolphin, Charles Darwin,” explains the narration. Atop the cherry is a British flag, to cue the memory that Charles Darwin was English. Next to the dolphin is an island, shaped like a golden goose. (“Golden goose, Galapagos.”) A bearded man is sitting cross legged with a book called Natural Selection on his lap. He isn’t wearing any clothes; this “natural outfit,” explains the narration, is to remind the learner that he was a naturalist. Perched in a tree above Darwin are three gray birds with thick, green beaks and a bag labeled “nuts.” On nearby islands are similar gray birds, except that the birds on one island have thin beaks that they’re using to drink from flowers and others on a separate island have pointed beaks they’re using to eat worms. A large, green monster has red plumage and a hapless bird foot protruding from its mouth, reminding learners that brightly colored birds were not adapted to the Galapagos because they were too easily spotted by predators.

All of this is explained in less than a minute and a half, and the images are so strange and memorable that it would be difficult to forget either the terminology or the concepts illustrated.

Students can select either “Classic” or “Creative” audio to explain the image to them. The creative audio sometimes takes the form of a jingle or rap and sometimes that of a narrative story with a plot. We recommend listening to both, though the creative audio seems to work best after the classic has already established the basic facts.

One aspect of the Picmonic we really like is the rating scale that appears at the bottom of each card. Once a student has learned the material, he can quantify his grasp of the concepts on a scale of one through five by indicating whether he “doesn’t know it” (1), “gets it” (5) and anywhere in between. The card will then go into a “pile” of cards with the same rating so students will know what they need to review and what they don’t.

Interested? You can try Picmonic for free to get a sense of whether this style of learning is right for you or your student. All of Picmonic’s content is available for either a monthly subscription fee or a one-time fee.

Photo credit: Flickr:  Ano Lobb

Recommended Reads: Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli

Note to our readers: As we continue our occasional Friday posts from our Recommended Reads series, we want to remind you that you can search our blog for other recommendations and reviews. Just scroll down the list of "tags" on the right hand side of this page and click on "Recommended Reads."

Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli

Ages: A sixth grader could read this book easily, but it will be interesting also to high school students. (See “Our Take” below)

Plot: Stargirl makes a splash the moment she shows up at Leo’s high school on her first day of tenth grade. The student body crackles with gossip about this strange new girl. They’ve never seen anyone like her. Stargirl was home schooled, and this is her first foray into the traditional education system. She wears outlandish clothes and carries her pet rat Cinnamon around in her bag. She sings to each student on their birthdays, whether or not she’s ever spoken to them before, accompanying herself on her ukulele. She says outrageous things in class and hands out cookies, just because. The students are suspicious at first, then disparaging, but then they grow to admire Stargirl and her antics. But her habit of cheering for both teams when she is recruited for the cheerleading squad turns many against her, and soon, Stargirl is hated by nearly every confused student at her school. Leo, who has been watching from the sidelines for months, finds himself falling for Stargirl, and is pulled into the middle of an ugly battle royal. But can it really be called a battle when cheerful Stargirl seems oblivious to the other students’ ire? Leo, however, whose outlook is more conventional, has an agonizing choice to make: Will he side with the fun-loving, brilliant, free-spirited Stargirl and remain an outcast, or abandon her to rejoin the comfortable ranks of his peers?

Our Take: Spinelli, the genius who brought us the classic Maniac Magee, is equally deft in spinning this unforgettable tale of a free spirit caught in the maelstrom of conformist high school life. Much as we loved Stargirl, at times we felt confusion and frustration at her antics, as Leo must have, wondering why she couldn’t just tone it down a bit to fit in. By the end, however, we were a bit ashamed of ourselves (again, like Leo) for wishing that Stargirl would ever be anything but her inimitable self. This is an excellent book for exploring the themes of individuality and group mentality. The hostility and anger that Stargirl’s kindness brings out in her new classmates is breathtaking, and savvy adults will be able to find plenty of real-world examples of resentment aimed at people or groups who are “different” to share with the kids who read this book.

Stargirl is a particularly excellent choice for high school students who struggle with reading. The writing is simple enough to make it an early middle school-level read, but its protagonists are sophomores and juniors, so high school students won’t feel as though they’re reading “dumbed down” material. It's a great example of the kind of  "high interest-low readability" book we've written about before.

Adult Content: None

Good to Know: Good news to those who fall in love with Stargirl: A sequel, Love, Stargirl, is available, as is a Stargirl journal for recording your own wild ideas.