Are You as Smart as This Fourth Grader?
Are You as Smart as This Fourth Grader?
Happy Monday morning everyone. It's Dr. Kathy Miller from Indiana University back with another Medscape video oncology blog. Today is just a bit of a quick feel-good moment for you. I have blogged in the past about my concern about the significant decline in science and technology literacy. That's a decline that affects all segments of our population. We see it in our school system and we see it in the patients that we serve. It creates a whole host of problems and it's still a big problem.
I'm going to show you a bright spot that I learned about recently. The fourth-grade daughter of one of our patients here in the Indiana University breast program just won her local science fair, and she had such a cool project that I just had to share it with you. She recognized some short-term memory problems that her mother was having in the midst of her chemotherapy, and she wondered -- is this "chemo brain thing" real or is Mom just using this as an excuse? If it's real, are there things we could do that could help?
She went to our infusion center. She recruited 15 people who were receiving chemotherapy and 15 people who were not receiving chemotherapy. She wanted to test their short-term memory, so here's how she went about it. She came up with a list of 10 common everyday items, put together a list of 10 words and asked people to either read the list of 10 words aloud, read them to themselves silently, listen to her read the words, or write down the list of words. Then she asked them to recite the alphabet so that she knew that she was testing their short-term memory, not working memory -- the sort of working memory you would use to remember a phone number from the phone book before dialing the phone.
After they recited the alphabet, she asked them to remember and write down as many of those 10 words as they could. What she found was...it's real. People who were on chemotherapy didn't remember as many words as people who were not on chemotherapy, but they did better if they wrote the words down than just saying them to themselves or just hearing them. This is a project conceived, designed, and executed by a fourth-grade student.
Personally, I want to recruit her to my staff. I want her to follow this passion because she has real talent, but this is the sort of excitement about science that we need to get into our science classes at school and that we need to foster in our society that could help us improve in this crucial area going forward. Think about this with your own kids in your own schools and patients and children you come in contact with and join us in saying "Job well done, Erin."
Happy Monday morning everyone. It's Dr. Kathy Miller from Indiana University back with another Medscape video oncology blog. Today is just a bit of a quick feel-good moment for you. I have blogged in the past about my concern about the significant decline in science and technology literacy. That's a decline that affects all segments of our population. We see it in our school system and we see it in the patients that we serve. It creates a whole host of problems and it's still a big problem.
I'm going to show you a bright spot that I learned about recently. The fourth-grade daughter of one of our patients here in the Indiana University breast program just won her local science fair, and she had such a cool project that I just had to share it with you. She recognized some short-term memory problems that her mother was having in the midst of her chemotherapy, and she wondered -- is this "chemo brain thing" real or is Mom just using this as an excuse? If it's real, are there things we could do that could help?
She went to our infusion center. She recruited 15 people who were receiving chemotherapy and 15 people who were not receiving chemotherapy. She wanted to test their short-term memory, so here's how she went about it. She came up with a list of 10 common everyday items, put together a list of 10 words and asked people to either read the list of 10 words aloud, read them to themselves silently, listen to her read the words, or write down the list of words. Then she asked them to recite the alphabet so that she knew that she was testing their short-term memory, not working memory -- the sort of working memory you would use to remember a phone number from the phone book before dialing the phone.
After they recited the alphabet, she asked them to remember and write down as many of those 10 words as they could. What she found was...it's real. People who were on chemotherapy didn't remember as many words as people who were not on chemotherapy, but they did better if they wrote the words down than just saying them to themselves or just hearing them. This is a project conceived, designed, and executed by a fourth-grade student.
Personally, I want to recruit her to my staff. I want her to follow this passion because she has real talent, but this is the sort of excitement about science that we need to get into our science classes at school and that we need to foster in our society that could help us improve in this crucial area going forward. Think about this with your own kids in your own schools and patients and children you come in contact with and join us in saying "Job well done, Erin."
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