Attack of the Teenage Brain

Understanding and Supporting the Weird and Wonderful Adolescent Learner

John Medina

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781416625520
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

Marvel at the neuroscientific reasons why smart teens make dumb decisions!
Behold the mind-controlling power of executive function!
Thrill to a vision of a better school for the teenage brain!

Whether you're a parent interacting with one adolescent or a teacher interacting with many, you know teens can be hard to parent and even harder to teach. The eye-rolling, the moodiness, the wandering attention, the drama. It's not you, it's them. More specifically, it's their brains.

In accessible language and with periodic references to Star Trek, motorcycle daredevils, and near-classic movies of the '80s, developmental molecular biologist John Medina, author of the New York Times best-seller Brain Rules, explores the neurological and evolutionary factors that drive teenage behavior and can affect both achievement and engagement. Then he proposes a research-supported counterattack: a bold redesign of educational practices and learning environments to deliberately develop teens' cognitive capacity to manage their emotions, plan, prioritize, and focus.

Attack of the Teenage Brain! is an enlightening and entertaining read that will change the way you think about teen behavior and prompt you to consider how else parents, educators, and policymakers might collaborate to help our challenging, sometimes infuriating, often weird, and genuinely wonderful kids become more successful learners, in school and beyond.

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Part I

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A Bridge Over an Educational Chasm

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This part consists of a single problem-solving chapter. The pain point is one of the shames of American secondary education—our high schoolers' embarrassing international test scores. The remedy involves the cognitive gadget called executive function.

It's a "let's-roll-up-our" sleeves background for the rest of the book, which involves reimagining what a secondary educational experience might look like if optimizing teen brain development were its primary goal. And it all starts with a motorcycle, ridden by a man who didn't even finish high school.

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Chapter 1

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All About Executive Function

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You really question Darwin's assertion that only the fittest survive when you consider the antics of famed motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel.

Back in 1974, Mr. Knievel got it into his head to jump the Snake River Canyon and have the attempt broadcast live on television. He announced that the stunt would occur near Twin Falls, Idaho, and that he'd jump from the canyon's south cliff to the north one, spanning a suicidal distance of nearly three-quarters of a mile. Because no Harley made has that kind of engine power, Knievel employed what was, for all intents and purposes, a two-wheeled rocket ship dubbed "The Skycycle." The spectacle ended up as one of the most famous nonevents in the checkered history of television, because the major networks refused to cover it.¹

The good news was that Knievel survived. The bad news was that the jump was a bust. It began well enough, with the rocket roaring to life under the secure watch of the guy who built it, a former Naval rocket engineer. The Skycycle's parachute system wasn't as well behaved, unfortunately. It deployed early, almost as soon as the daredevil was airborne. Knievel drifted slowly, safely, to the canyon bottom, the wind blowing him back to the south side to a spot just below his point of origin. The Snake River Canyon would remain un-jumped for decades to come. When stuntman Eddie Braun accomplished the feat in 2016, he used a rocket-powered motorcycle designed by the son of the engineer who had developed Knievel's.

I'm going to use this jump by Knievel, a true American original, to describe something puzzling about another American original, the K–16 education system of the United States. To understand where the parallels lie, let's begin—perhaps unconventionally—at the end.

All Steak, No Sizzle

Much empirical evidence exists to support the self-serving, chest-puffing observation that higher education in the United States is the envy of the world. According to the research magazine Nature, nearly two-thirds of the world's highest-rated universities are American, including three of the top five.² The ratings may be deserved, if award-winning productivity is any measurement. More Nobel prizes have been given to U.S. scientists than to scientists in the next five represented countries combined.³ The United States is especially strong in natural sciences Nobels; most are awarded to people who are (or were) employed by those top-ranked universities. Think of higher education in the United States as the terminating north cliff goal of Knievel's Snake River Canyon attempt, only with a happy ending.

In this metaphor, U.S. elementary schools are Knievel's starting point on the south side of the canyon, and they are similarly solid. The federal government (in the form of the National Assessment in Educational Progress, or NAEP) has been measuring school performance for decades, and its findings show that elementary schools are doing a pretty good job.⁴ Although U.S. students are well-known to be underperformers in math, NAEP's findings show that our 4th graders' elementary math scores have increased 11 percent since the early 1970s. Reading scores have also improved—up 6 percent—in the same kids and over the same time span. American elementary schools' scores have been rising like yeast for years, and they are sufficiently robust, comparing favorably with schools in other countries.

So the two sides of the U.S. education "canyon" are in good shape. And if all you had to go on were these two data points, you'd think the system could be drawn as a statistically pleasing straight line that begins in quality elementary education and terminates at the pearly gates of Nobel Prize–festooned colleges.

Unfortunately, we're going to have to fasten our seat belts for the bumpy landing. A comparison of the scores of recent U.S. 17-year-olds to ones put up by 17-year-olds 40 years ago shows not one whit of improvement in math or reading. Teens today actually scored worse in science.⁵ This means kids who were tested back when Pong was all the rage in video games achieved at basically the same levels as kids who grew up with Grand Theft Auto. The score differential for minority and disadvantaged youth shows even less progress.

This stasis is embarrassing, especially when U.S. language arts and math scores are compared with those of the rest of the world. Our 15-year-olds come in at a depressing #24 on the 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). And for math, we are #36 out of 40.⁶ Says noted psychologist Laurence Steinberg:

Over the past forty years … and despite billions of dollars invested in school reform, there has been no improvement—none—in the academic proficiency of American high-school students. It's not just No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top that has failed our adolescents—it's everything we have tried.⁷

The italic emphasis is Steinberg's, but his pessimistic outlook is ours for the keeping.

And the bad news keeps rolling in, especially when our students try scampering up the far side of our educational chasm, banging on the doors of our lofty universities' admissions offices. To put it bluntly, many high school graduates just aren't ready for college. About 20 percent of starting freshmen spend time in the remedial education penalty box, and for an embarrassing reason: they didn't master the basics necessary to compete in world-class institutions.

It's even worse for students entering community colleges. About 50 percent need additional preparatory work,⁸ except in California, where the figure is 80 percent.⁹ And here's the weird thing: those Californian students in need of remediation graduated from their secondary schools with a B average, in the upper third of their classmates.¹⁰ To make matters worse, many students who enroll in these "developmental courses" get stuck in them like a dinosaur in a tar pit. After six years, only 16 percent of the enrollees went on to get a degree.¹¹

A Bridge Named Executive Function

These achievement data are ugly for sure, but they're not the whole story of U.S. education. There has been some recent improvement in grades and even graduation rates, especially for underserved populations. Still, that isn't much reassurance, especially when budgetary issues are taken into consideration. Higher graduation rates don't translate to much if you have to spend $3 billion a year—as we do—just to get kids up to scratch.¹² That kind of money should help make every kid an Eddie Braun, but we still have far too many Evel Knievels.

Obviously, we need to build a superior rocket-cycle—or even better, dispense with the quick fix altogether and build a bridge. That's what this book is all about: how to span the yawning academic chasm between strong elementary education and strong college education. We are going to use a modern neuroscientific understanding of teen brain development as the wood, hammer, and nail of the construction. This bridge even has a name, though it may sound more like something from a business school than a brain science concept: executive function.

Of T. rex and Marshmallows

Executive function (EF), defined in its baldest operational terms, is the ability to get something done—and not punch someone in the nose while doing it. That's a useful bit of oversimplification; to go more in depth, I'd like to start by explaining part of EF's origin story. To do that, I'll discuss the discovery of a dinosaur named Sue, then quickly move to marshmallows.

Obviously, I have some explaining to do.

Sue wasn't supposed to be discovered. The research team that found her had spent a summer in South Dakota digging for Cretaceous-era vegetarians and were packed up and ready to head home. Then a flat tire delayed the group's departure. While the tire was being fixed, self-taught paleontologist Sue Hendrickson wandered off for one last look around the geological neighborhood. It was an impulse that made her career. Spying a few curious-looking rocks at the foot of a nearby ridge, she looked up and noticed an even more curious protrusion jutting off the cliff's face.

The trip home could wait. Investigation of the protrusion revealed it to be a bone of the most intact fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex ever found. Almost 90 percent of skeleton was there (a paleontological find is considered monumental if just 50 percent of the bones are discovered). The famous fossil was named Sue, after her discoverer.¹³

This tip-of-the-iceberg phenomenon—that what looks at first to be a small finding can turn out to be a really big discovery—isn't limited to paleontology. You can see the same principle working in one of the most well-known experiments in the field of behavioral science, the one that eventually exposed the phenomenon of executive function. There, marshmallows took the place of digging equipment and fancy research-grade plasters.

Walter Mischel's legendary experiments at Stanford University in the late 1960s dealt with how children resisted temptation. In the experiment's most famous version, following a premise right out of TV's Let's Make a Deal, Mischel offered a series of 4-year-olds the choice of eating one tasty marshmallow immediately or waiting for 15 minutes—alone in the room, just the child and the uneaten marshmallow—after which he or she would receive two tasty marshmallows to eat.¹⁴

What happened could be difficult to watch. Most kids took the deal, though very few were able to follow through. Some kids ate the marshmallow within 30 seconds of the researcher leaving the room. Some valiantly resisted for a while, sitting on their hands, turning their backs to the marshmallow, or counting to 10 before caving in. A handful of supremely self-controlled subjects held out for the entire 15 minutes.

Records of each participant's results were stored for a long time while these kids percolated through the U.S. education system and into adulthood. Years later, Walter Mischel and his colleagues looked up hundreds of the young marshmallow experiment veterans to see how they had turned out.

What they found was both depressing and encouraging—and ultimately, groundbreaking. The kids who exhibited little self-control as 4-year-olds still exhibited little self-control years later. They achieved poorer grades and were less popular in school. They were more likely to be obese and more prone to drug abuse. The kids who held out for the whole 15 minutes also displayed extraordinary self-control years later. They got better grades in school and were more socially competent. They were physically fit and didn't abuse drugs. The data were fine-grained enough to conclude that the 15-minute holdouts scored, on average, 210 points higher on the SAT than the kids who caved within half a minute.¹⁵

The marshmallow experiment proved to be the Sue-bone protruding from the cliff. Further investigations into self-control revealed an entire body of behavioral tendencies that, as a group, were ultimately termed "executive function." This area of investigation is still very active, and for a very important reason: executive function correctly predicts aspects of a student's future. The accuracy of such statistical palm reading is about as rare in the behavioral sciences as prehistoric soft tissue is in paleontological finds. And one of the hottest areas of research involves the teen brain, with its hallmark developmental feature being the elaboration of executive function.

I will restate what I wrote in the Introduction—every teacher of teenagers should understand what executive function is and how it develops in adolescent brains—and underscore the urgency of such a claim by detailing how executive function comes by its predictive, prophetic power.

One Plus One Plus One Equals More

Despite the simplicity of its two-word label, executive function is tricky to define. It doesn't help that many scientists disagree on exactly what the darned thing is, managing to agree on just a few basic tenets. Fortunately, we can combine and recombine these few basic tenets to assemble a host of explanations for our external actions.

I am reminded of the purchasing habits my wife and I developed when we were in graduate school, and usually as broke as public television. In those poorer times, we were always on the lookout for a good deal on anything, down to the clothes we bought. My wife taught me the money-saving power of creating a mix-and-match wardrobe by buying a few elemental articles of clothing and combining them in different ways for different occasions. Similarly, EF encompasses a bewilderingly complex collection of human behaviors, but at its core are three simple, easily combined, and easily understood behavioral elements.

A Complex List

Let's look at an example of executive function in action.

Imagine your supervisor is yelling at you. You are startled, because he rarely yells at anyone. The ranting continues, and soon you want to punch him in the nose. But you don't. You engage in some emotional editing because you understand what the consequences of your desired action would be (loss of job security, impending assault charges) and you take responsibility for avoiding those consequences. You can perform this emotional editing because you're able to respond to situations as they occur, weighing advantages, managing risk, and imagining in advance what might happen if you choose violence. Your ability to respond in this fluid manner allows you to move from your present anger ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Part I. A Bridge Over an Educational Chasm
• Part II. Why Rational Teens Make Rash Choices
• Part III. A Better School for the Teenage Brain: What Adults Can Do
• Part IV. A Better School for the Teenage Brain: What Teens Can Do (and How Adults Can Help)
• Epilogue. Building That Bridge
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Related ASCD Resources
• About the Author
• Copyright