Can technology impede student learning?

Computers, video games and multitasking may have helped improve people's visual skills, but they also appear to have contributed to an erosion in critical-thinking and analysis skills. That's according to new research published in the journal Science.

Reading, however, develops the imagination as well as deductive, reflection and critical-thinking stills, said researcher and UCLA psychology professor Patricia Greenfield. Greenfield also directs the Children's Digital Media Center of Los Angeles.

"No one medium is good for everything," she said. "If we want to develop a variety of skills, we need a balanced media diet."

Details on ScienceDaily.