Jay N. Giedd, MD
National Institute of Mental Health
see abstract
- Magnetic resonance images show that the brain's gray matter thickens during adolescence—peaking around age 11 in girls and 12½ in boys—owing to an increase in connectivity, and then "prunes," or thins down as adulthood approaches.
- Although the brain then has more choices of pathways through which to send signals, those pathways are not necessarily faster, making some processing inefficient.
- White matter increases linearly during adolescence, while the cerebellum also grows in volume.
- Adolescence is the most efficient time for motor learning, when teens can aptly take on such activities as sports, drawing, and instrumental music.
- Links between MRI data and behavior cannot yet be made, but that is the goal of these studies.
peaking around age 11 in girls and 12½ in boys
So I'm thinking that basing decisions about admittance into accelerated & honors courses in maturity might be a tiny bit discriminatory, you think?
As might be a policy of teaching accelerated and honors courses only the most mature teen can handle.
see: the girl show
this part is cool
Adolescence is the most efficient time for motor learning, when teens can aptly take on such activities as sports, drawing, and instrumental music.
Great minds resonant magnetically alike!
ReplyDeleteyou're kidding!
ReplyDeletedid you find your Singapore Math thing independently of me finding adolescent brain??
I definitely found mine before knowing you were looking at yours.
Yours is a FANTASTIC find!
Very cool.
I've had it in "edit" mode for a few days now. I sent it through when I saw your post here.
ReplyDeleteThe bar diagrams are a very clever way of making a topic everyone assumes is much too abstract accessible to younger children.
Sort of a nerdy aside: the Greeks too relied on similar visual presentations of topics for which we would use symbols. (a + b)^2 is represented using a line diagram in Euclid's Elements. And they used line segments rather than numbers to illustrate ratio.