Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
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“I do not think that they are fundamentally different from young adults. However,
I do believe that so many things are changing with their mental and physi-
cal development that they tend to experience more mood changes than adults.
However, they are able to think and act very mature and stable as well.”
“
they feel invincible.”
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“Adolescents take risks sometimes as a way of testing the limits/boundaries of
life. They need to learn some lessons of life the hard way. Sometimes it takes
getting burned by fire to learn to respect its power. Part of the reason for the
passion expressed by teens is the fact that they are experiencing so much for
the first time. Everything is so exciting and new. They have not experienced the
full set of consequences of living. The first time that you fall in love, you never
imagine that it will eventually end. Experience and statistics will enlighten you
at a later stage in your life. The same way that it takes time to learn how to
cope with the effects of foreign substances in your body, it takes time to cope
with changes in your internal body chemistry. In other words, getting used to
determining how to cope with the effects of alcohol has some similarities with
getting used to coping with changes in hormone levels. This is demonstrated
throughout adulthood in terms of changes in the levels of hormones in males and
females and the accompanying changes in behaviors, feelings and moods.”
These examples show the striking variability in students' answers to the question
posed by the author, and mirror the variability that typically occurred. By com-
paring their responses with their peers, students could self-evaluate the depth and
complexity of their thinking and consider adolescent risk taking from the perspec-
tives of everyone in the class, thereby enhancing thinking and meaningful learning.
Class discussions rarely enable all students to answer the same question in detail, so
this is a specific benefit of annotating text within the HyLighter environment.
HyLighter enables documents to be living, dynamic objects which teachers can
tailor to the characteristics of particular courses and students. Although the author
posed excellent questions in “The Biology of Risk Taking” to prompt more interac-
tivity, reflection, and critical thinking, and require students to consider other issues,
I embedded my own questions within the article. The questions were linked to spe-
cific sections of the article and included instructions for students to answer them and
to read each other's answers.
One question that I embedded required students to reflect on and share views
of adolescent maturity based on their cultural background. Activating and com-
municating this information was intended to prompt both meaningful learning and
transfer. The question was “How does the culture that you came from view the
maturity of adolescents?” Examples of students' answers are as follows:
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“The culture that I came from viewed adolescents as somewhat unable to function
on their own, or dependent. Therefore their opinions were unimportant. “Seen,
but not heard.”
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“My cultural background is Austrian. My mother being a war bride after WWII
came to this country with a very strict and authoritarian attitude as was in her
